VMware vSphere Foundation: What are the alternatives?

After Broadcom discontinued perpetual licences and introduced the subscription model, many customers were already unpleasantly surprised. On top of licences becoming significantly more expensive, Broadcom has once again tightened its licensing model. It is now even only possible to purchase a VMware vSphere Foundation subscription for a maximum of one year. Understandably, companies fear that subscription costs will rise sharply after the first year. And if you don’t pay, you simply lose the ability to manage your VMs, you can’t even power them on or off.

In the meantime, we have received many questions about alternatives from organisations that do not want to move to the public cloud, or whose VM workloads are not yet cloud-native ready.

Please note: all prices in this article are indicative and based on Q1 2026. Actual pricing depends on cluster size, contract duration, partner and hardware choices.

What is included in VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF)

Since Broadcom’s portfolio overhaul, separate editions like vSphere Enterprise Plus, vSAN Enterprise or Aria Standard no longer exist as standalone SKUs. Everything is now sold as a single integrated bundle: VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF). The bundle contains the following components:

Overview of the bundle

• vSphere (ESXi + vCenter Server), the hypervisor and management layer, including all advanced virtualisation features such as HA, DRS, vMotion, Distributed Switch, Fault Tolerance and Replication
• vSAN: software-defined storage with 250 GiB of vSAN capacity per core (recently raised from 100 GiB/core)
• vSphere IaaS Control Plane (formerly vSphere with Tanzu), native Kubernetes runtime inside vSphere, including VMware Kubernetes Service (VKS)
• VMware Aria Suite Standard: operations monitoring, capacity management and log analytics
• Broadcom Essential (Production) Support: 24/7 support included

Not included: NSX, HCX, Aria Automation or Site Recovery. For those capabilities you need to move up to VCF (VMware Cloud Foundation), which substantially increases the price.

Hardware baseline

For the sizing and pricing calculations we assume the following hardware:

4× HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen11 (256 CPU cores total), per host:

• 2× Intel Xeon-G 6530 CPU
• 768 GB memory
• 6× 3.2 TB NVMe

Despite VMware’s limited pricing transparency and the fact that mid-sized companies can now only purchase licences through official partners, we have put together a price indication.

With a setup of four HPE ProLiant Gen11 servers totalling 256 CPU cores, prices at a VMware reseller currently average between €180 and €220 per core. For simplicity we use €200 per core. With VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF), the annual subscription comes out at €51,200. Keep in mind: the minimum commitment is 72 cores.

Which alternatives are there?

We looked at the following solutions:

• Nutanix
• Hyper-V
• XCP-ng
• Proxmox VE
• SUSE Harvester (under review)
• KVM with OpenNebula, OpenStack or Apache CloudStack (under review)

We evaluated them against the following criteria:

• Which company is behind the solution
• How large is the user base
• What does it cost
• Which features are offered
• How long has the solution existed

Nutanix

Nutanix was founded in 2009 and released its first hyperconverged platform in 2011. The idea was simple but innovative: combine compute and storage in a single integrated solution, fully software-defined. Where VMware started from the hypervisor and later added vSAN, Nutanix was designed as a full-blown HCI stack from day one. Worldwide, Nutanix now has an estimated 27,000–29,000 customers and is often seen as the alternative now that VMware customers are uneasy following the Broadcom acquisition.

Key features of Nutanix Pro

• Hypervisor (AHV) included: no additional licensing cost unlike VMware
• Fully integrated HCI storage: erasure coding, deduplication, compression, snapshots and replication
• Prism Pro: a single console for compute, storage, monitoring and capacity planning
• Lifecycle management: 1-click upgrades of hypervisor, drivers and firmware
• Kubernetes (NKE): built-in managed Kubernetes environment
• Multicloud integration (NC2): extend clusters to AWS or Azure

Hardware support

If you want to run Nutanix, you quickly discover you cannot just buy a standard HPE or Dell server. You need a specific Nutanix-ready series. For our use case we looked at the HPE ProLiant DX (Gen11) with a Nutanix Pro licence, since VMware vSphere Foundation does not include NSX capabilities either.

Nutanix with Prism excels at innovation and simplicity. All management functions, compute, storage and monitoring, come together in a single clear console. This feels intuitive and saves time. With VMware, by contrast, you often have to combine several management consoles (vCenter, vSAN, Aria), which increases complexity.

Backup

Like VMware, Nutanix with a Pro licence does not offer a full built-in backup solution. You have to handle this yourself with a product like HYCU, Veeam or Rubrik. You do get snapshots and replication via AOS out of the box, and there is a separate product (Nutanix Mine) for integrated backup, but that requires an additional licence.

Cost

Like VMware, Nutanix is not very transparent about pricing, which depends heavily on size and contract length. What is clear is that the Nutanix-specific DX series is on average around 10% more expensive than a standard HPE ProLiant DL Gen11. Nutanix Pro licences are billed per CPU core, with prices typically between €260 and €290 per core per year.

Using €270 per core and our baseline of 256 cores, the total comes out at €69,120 per year.

For comparison: VMware vSphere Foundation costs €51,200 per year for the same cluster. Nutanix is therefore around 35% more expensive, excluding the higher hardware costs. These are indicative prices based on our baseline setup, with a 2- or 3-year commitment and a larger environment the price can drop.

Conclusion

Although Nutanix is an excellent product, commercially it is not really an alternative for organisations that have been on VMware for years and are now primarily looking for a more cost-efficient solution. In terms of features and management Nutanix scores strongly, with simplicity and integration as its main strengths, but the price tag may give you a shock.

XCP-ng

XCP-ng (Xen Cloud Platform – Next Generation) emerged in 2018 as an open-source fork of Citrix XenServer, after Citrix stripped down the free version. The French company Vates has since taken over stewardship of the project and provides support and development alongside the community. The platform builds on the Xen hypervisor and offers a stable alternative for organisations that used to run Citrix XenServer.

Key features

• Xen hypervisor: proven stable, but less modern than KVM or ESXi
• Xen Orchestra (XO): web-based management console for VMs, snapshots and replication
• XO Lite: a newer, lighter interface integrated into the hypervisor itself (still in development)
• Live migration: comparable to vMotion
• High Availability: basic HA functionality available
• Backup & DR: built into XO (full and incremental backups, replication)
• Storage: traditional LVM/iSCSI/NFS, or XOSTOR as software-defined storage (based on LINBIT LINSTOR/DRBD)

Backup

Through Xen Orchestra, XCP-ng offers a reasonably mature backup and replication solution:

• Full and incremental VM backups
• Replication to other hosts or clusters
• Flexible scheduling and retention policies

One limitation is that there are no official integrations with well-known third-party backup tools such as Veeam, Commvault or Rubrik. For enterprises already using those tools, that can be a drawback.

Hardware support

XCP-ng runs well on HPE ProLiant, Dell PowerEdge and Supermicro servers. Vates publishes a compatibility list, but the ecosystem is smaller than that of VMware or Nutanix. Firmware and driver updates are largely your own responsibility; there is no integrated lifecycle management like Prism (Nutanix) or vLCM (VMware).

Cost

XCP-ng has a clear and transparent cost structure:

• Enterprise licence: €1,800 per host per year (including 24/7 support and a 1-hour response time)
• XOSTOR add-on: €1,200 per host per year
• Total per host (Enterprise + XOSTOR): €3,000 per year

For our baseline system (4× HPE DL360 Gen11) this comes down to:

• Enterprise licences: 4 × €1,800 = €7,200 per year
• XOSTOR add-on: 4 × €1,200 = €4,800 per year
• Total cluster cost: €12,000 per year

That is many times cheaper than VMware or Nutanix, with no hidden modules or complex bundles.

Experiences from the field

In our experience an XCP-ng environment runs stably, but development moves slowly. Xen Orchestra feels dated; the GUI looks old-fashioned and sometimes misses logical settings, which means you often fall back to the legacy XenCenter. XO Lite promises a modern interface, but is still limited in scope. XOSTOR is also relatively new and still has to prove itself in production.

User base

The user base is relatively small. There is an active community, but it is much smaller than that of VMware or Proxmox. Adoption is mostly seen at organisations migrating away from XenServer and looking for something comparable.

Conclusion

XCP-ng is a stable and affordable platform. With built-in backup/replication and the XOSTOR add-on, you can build a complete HCI environment for a fraction of the price of VMware or Nutanix. At the same time, slow innovation, a dated GUI, limited third-party integration and a small user base are important drawbacks. For former XenServer users, however, it is an attractive and transparently priced alternative.

Hyper-V

Microsoft Hyper-V has been around since 2008 and is the default virtualisation solution inside Windows Server. Where VMware and Nutanix focus on integrated Private and Hybrid Cloud platforms, Hyper-V often feels more like a component of Windows Server than a mature and innovative virtualisation platform in its own right.

Key features

• Hyper-V role in Windows Server: built-in hypervisor that runs on Windows Server Datacenter or Standard
• Storage Spaces Direct (S2D): software-defined storage for clustering and HCI, only available with a Datacenter licence
• Live Migration and HA: comparable to vMotion and HA in VMware
• SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager): required management tool for serious environments; Hyper-V Manager and Windows Admin Center are far too limited
• Azure integration: via Azure Arc or Azure Stack HCI, but effectively a different licensing model (more “Azure on your own hardware”)

Backup

Hyper-V supports Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) and can integrate with backup tools that provide agents (e.g. Veeam, Commvault). Snapshots exist, but are notorious for their inconsistency and performance problems, certainly over long periods of use or with complex configurations.

Hardware support

Because Hyper-V is part of Windows Server, it officially only runs on Windows-certified servers such as HPE ProLiant or Dell PowerEdge. Hardware compatibility is usually not a problem, but lifecycle management (firmware, drivers) is handled by the server vendor and is not integrated into Hyper-V itself.

Cost

This is where confusion usually starts. On paper Hyper-V looks cheap (it’s just included with Windows Server, right?), but in practice you have to fight your way through a jungle of licensing models. Sometimes you feel you need a degree in rocket science to make sense of it all.

The key points:

• Windows Server Datacenter 2025 licences are required for Storage Spaces Direct
• Indicative price: ± €5,500 per 16-core licence
• Each DL360 Gen11 host has 64 cores = 4 × 16-core licences = ± €22,000 per server
• For 4 servers: ± €88,000 total

Licensing model:

• One-off: Windows Server Datacenter is a perpetual licence. You pay this amount upfront.
• With Software Assurance (SA): for upgrades, patches and support, add ± 25–30% of the licence value per year. For this cluster that is €22,000–€26,000 per year.
• SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager) is required for proper management. For 256 cores: ± €25,000–€30,000 per year.

Scenarios for our cluster (4 hosts, 256 cores):

• Without SA: one-off €88,000 + annually ± €25,000–€30,000 for SCVMM
• With SA: annually €22,000–€26,000 (SA) + €25,000–€30,000 (SCVMM) = ± €50,000–€55,000 per year

As with the other platforms, these are indicative numbers and can turn out higher or lower depending on various factors.

Experiences and limitations

• Management: Hyper-V Manager and Windows Admin Center are too limited for serious clusters. Without SCVMM you miss crucial features such as proper cloning, templating and automation.
• Innovation: after all these years, Hyper-V still does not feel innovative. The interface is functional, but cumbersome and far from intuitive.
• Storage Spaces Direct: often a source of complaints, unstable performance, configuration complexity, snapshots that are not always reliable.
• Use case: the real advantage of Hyper-V lies in licence optimisation for Windows VMs. Because a Windows Server Datacenter licence covers unlimited Windows VMs, it can be financially attractive in environments that run almost exclusively on Windows. For Linux or mixed workloads this benefit disappears.
• Azure Stack HCI: Microsoft’s new direction, where you manage your Hyper-V cluster through Azure. This feels more like an Azure extension than an on-prem product and falls outside the scope of this comparison.

User base

Hyper-V is widely used worldwide in Windows-oriented environments, but the community is less active than that of VMware or Proxmox. Innovation has felt subdued for years, and many users describe the platform as “functional but dated”.

Conclusion

Hyper-V with SCVMM and Storage Spaces Direct is a functional but uninspiring virtualisation platform. The cost structure is only advantageous if you really run a lot of Windows VMs and want to optimise Windows licensing. Beyond that, the licensing models are unnecessarily complex, management is cumbersome and innovation is limited. Compared to VMware, Nutanix or even Proxmox, Hyper-V feels like the least modern alternative.

Proxmox VE

Proxmox VE (Virtual Environment) has existed since 2008 and has matured into an open-source virtualisation platform used worldwide. It combines KVM for virtualisation, LXC for containers and Ceph for software-defined storage. Proxmox is particularly praised for its transparent licensing model, broad hardware support and large active community.

Key features

• Hypervisor (KVM) + containers (LXC): full VM virtualisation combined with lightweight containers
• Proxmox Web GUI: integrated, lightweight management console (no separate appliance required)
• High Availability & Clustering: easily connect and manage multiple nodes
• Ceph integration: fully integrated software-defined storage with replication, erasure coding and self-healing
• Software-Defined Networking (SDN): native SDN support, including VXLAN and BGP EVPN
• Proxmox Backup Server: powerful in-house backup solution with deduplication, encryption and scheduling
• Automation: via REST API, Ansible and Terraform provider (though the latter is still limited and split across two variants)

Backup

Proxmox offers its own fully integrated backup and replication solution with Proxmox Backup Server:

• Incremental backups with deduplication
• Encrypted backups out of the box
• Realtime client backups for VMs, containers and even physical machines
• Integrated directly into the GUI

This often makes external solutions unnecessary, although integrations with tools like Veeam are possible (via KVM support).

Hardware support

Proxmox runs well on a wide range of hardware, from homelab to enterprise. Thanks to the mainline Linux kernel, hardware support is very good and often more up to date than with commercial alternatives. Certification tracks like those of Nutanix or VMware are not required. Support subscriptions are available for enterprise environments.

Cost

Proxmox VE is open-source and free to use. For production use, Proxmox offers a support subscription per host, priced per CPU socket (not per core).

For our cluster of 4× HPE DL360 Gen11 (2 sockets per host = 8 sockets in total):

• Standard Support Subscription: €288 per socket per year
• Cost: 8 × €288 = €2,304 per year for the entire cluster

Even higher support tiers (Enterprise or Premium) stay well below the cost of VMware or Nutanix.

Experiences from the field

In practice, Proxmox offers an incredible amount for very little money. You get clustering, HA, Ceph, SDN and a powerful backup solution in a single package. The GUI is functional and clear, but could use a visual refresh. The Terraform provider is still somewhat limited, and the fact that two different providers exist does not help clarity.

There is no 24/7 support directly from Proxmox itself. You get business-hours support, but for critical SLAs (such as 24/7) you depend on external partners.

User base

Proxmox has a large and growing user base. According to recent figures, Proxmox VE runs on more than 1.5 million hosts worldwide, with a community of over 200,000 active members. This makes it the largest open-source competitor to VMware.

Conclusion

Proxmox VE is a feature-rich and cost-transparent alternative to VMware. For a fraction of the cost you get clustering, Ceph storage, SDN, backup and containers in a single platform. The main limitation is the lack of 24/7 enterprise support directly from Proxmox, but this can be covered through a reliable partner. Beyond that, Proxmox is a very attractive option, especially now that more and more organisations are looking for VMware alternatives.

At-a-glance comparison

Tip: scroll the table horizontally to see all columns.

Summary

• VMware → feature-rich, broad integration and ecosystem, but expensive and uncertain licensing under Broadcom.
• Nutanix Pro (DX) → highly integrated and simple management (Prism), modern HCI, but significantly more expensive than VMware.
• Hyper-V → only interesting if you run a huge number of Windows VMs and want to optimise Windows licensing; otherwise not very innovative and saddled with a complex licensing model.
• Proxmox VE → an incredible amount for very little money, large user base, powerful Ceph/SDN/backup, but no enterprise 24/7 support directly from Proxmox and a GUI that is functional yet a bit dated.
• XCP-ng → stable and inexpensive, a logical choice for former XenServer users, but small user base, slow innovation and XOSTOR still maturing.

Wondering which alternative best fits your environment? Get in touch for a no-obligation consultation.