Many organizations may consider open-source hypervisors such as Proxmox VE and OpenStack as cost-effective alternatives to vSphere. These solutions eliminate licensing fees and offer community-based support for self-management. However, they often fall short in delivering advanced enterprise-grade features in VM management. Besides, open-source solutions typically lack the responsive support services and expert troubleshooting capabilities offered by commercial vendors, placing greater demands on users’ development and operational expertise. Moreover, performance, reliability, and stability can vary significantly among open-source products. As such, extensive long-term testing is crucial to prevent potential business losses resulting from critical failures or insufficient performance and stability.

One cost-saving vSphere replacing option is to transition from the “vSphere+centralized storage” architecture to a simpler, more resilient, and agile hyper-converged architecture that converges virtualization with distributed storage.

For more details, please refer to Exploring VMware Alternatives? Tips for Enterprises with Varying Levels of VMware Dependency.