GoKawiilBroadcom’s acquisition of VMware in 2023 set off a wave of migrations that shows no signs of subsiding. But moving from VMware to another hypervisor may introduce significant technical and operational risks.
IT teams must prepare for challenges that are not always apparent at the start of a migration.
Price hikes, licensing changes and shifts in customer support have driven VMware customers to look for alternatives. Recent operational problems haven’t helped.
Last year, VMware Workstation auto-updates failed due to a Broadcom URL redirect. In 2026, the migration continues. Gartner research VP Julia Palmer recently predicted that VMware would lose 35% of its workloads by 2028.
Many of those workloads will shift to platforms such as Microsoft Hyper‑V, Azure Stack HCI, Nutanix AHV, Proxmox VE or KVM. Unfortunately, the journey comes with challenges. Switching hypervisors is a high-stakes infrastructure change.
IT professionals need to focus on completing a successful migration with their data intact and available.
Why hypervisor migration is technically risky
It sounds simple: Export data, convert it to a new format and then import it into a new hypervisor. But that process is far riskier than it sounds.
That’s because hypervisors don’t interoperate. Multiple technical variables increase the risk of failed or unstable migrations. Hypervisors differ in disk formats, hardware abstractions, driver stacks and networking models.
Virtual hardware versions, storage controllers, chipset emulation and network virtualization layers don’t always translate cleanly.
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