Your VMware Exit Strategy Starts Here: Introducing the VMware to OpenStack Migration Guide
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The Broadcom acquisition of VMware has sent ripples through the enterprise tech landscape. Licensing model changes, rising costs, reduced support for smaller customers, and uncertainty about product roadmaps have forced many IT leaders to ask the same urgent question:
“What’s our exit strategy?”
For organizations seeking cost predictability, future-ready infrastructure, and freedom from vendor lock-in, OpenStack offers a compelling alternative as the world’s most popular open source Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform. And now, there's a definitive resource to help you make the transition: a VMware to OpenStack Migration Guide, recently published by the OpenInfra Foundation.
Mirantis is proud to have contributed significant portions to this community-authored guide. In this blog, we’ll explain how the guide can help you navigate the road away from VMware, and why OpenStack and its vibrant ecosystem represent not just a way out of proprietary legacy virtualization, but also a powerful way forward for your evolving infrastructure requirements.
The Case for Leaving VMware
The rationale for migrating away from VMware has never been stronger:
License Cost Inflation: Many enterprises have seen a dramatic rise in costs under Broadcom’s new subscription model.
Reduced Product Breadth: The deprecation of smaller bundles and discontinuation of some standalone offerings has left customers scrambling.
Limited Flexibility: Traditional virtualization models often lock you into proprietary tooling and infrastructure.
Cloud-First Pressures: Teams are under pressure to modernize, scale efficiently, and operate across cloud and edge environments.
OpenStack answers these challenges with a mature, modular, and open source platform that enables self-determined cloud operations on bare metal, private cloud, or hybrid infrastructure.
A Migration Guide Built by the OpenInfra Community
Recognizing the urgency of this moment, the OpenInfra Foundation brought together a VMware Migration Working Group to create a practical, vendor-neutral migration playbook.
The VMware to OpenStack Migration Guide is a free, openly accessible document that covers:
Assessment and Planning: Understand your VMware environment and map it to OpenStack equivalents.
Workload Inventorying and Mapping: Learn how to categorize, evaluate, and prepare workloads for migration.
Operational Differences and Mindsets: Gain a realistic view of what changes — and what improves — in an OpenStack-based environment.
Migration Execution Patterns: Choose from proven migration strategies, from cold migrations to live workload conversion.
Mirantis subject matter experts contributed deeply to multiple sections, including Feature Comparisons, Storage, Hardware Recommendations, Resource Scheduling, Case Studies, and more, drawing on our experience helping companies like Booking.com, Inmarsat, and Nebul operationalize OpenStack at scale.
Why Mirantis? A Trusted OpenStack Partner
With over a decade of experience in open source cloud infrastructure, Mirantis is uniquely positioned to help organizations transition away from VMware and embrace OpenStack. We offer:
Turnkey OpenStack Deployments: With Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes, customers get a production-grade, highly automated cloud native virtualization platform that leverages the power of Kubernetes to bring resiliency, upgradability, and configurability to OpenStack.
Expert Workload Migration Services: From migration planning to execution, our professional services team helps de-risk every stage, with automated tooling, and deep expertise for migrating VMware workloads at scale.
Ongoing Support & Fully-Managed Remote Operations: Choose 24/7 enterprise support or fully-managed remote operations with up to 99.99% availability, the industry’s highest uptime SLA.
Community Leadership: We’re committed to upstream open source, not just as consumers, but as a top contributor to OpenStack for over a decade.
When you migrate with Mirantis, you're gaining a platform and a partner rooted in open collaboration that can provide the technology, expertise, and attentive service you need to successfully migrate to open source and achieve your business objectives.
Who Should Use the VMware to OpenStack Migration Guide?
This guide is built for:
Infrastructure and Cloud Architects looking to assess the technical feasibility of migration.
CIOs and CTOs who need a strategic roadmap away from vendor lock-in.
Operations and Platform Teams tasked with maintaining stability while moving to modern infrastructure.
Procurement and Finance Leaders under pressure to reduce licensing costs and avoid future lock-in.
Even if you’re not ready to switch today, the guide provides a comprehensive reference to help you evaluate OpenStack as an alternative to VMware and your options for migration.
What You’ll Gain
By following the guide and working with Mirantis, organizations benefit from:
Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) with open source infrastructure, typically over 50% in savings.
Operational Autonomy to run what you want, where you want and control your infrastructure roadmap.
Cloud-Native Integration with Kubernetes, Ceph, and more.
Ready to Begin?
The VMware to OpenStack Migration Guide is free and available now.
At Mirantis, we believe migrations should be open, collaborative, and grounded in real-world experience. That’s why we’re proud to contribute to this effort and offer guidance to enterprises ready to begin their infrastructure modernization.
Need help evaluating your migration options? Contact Mirantis to talk to one of our migration experts.
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