Facing Broadcom’s decision to discontinue VMware vSphere Standard in May 2025, many IT teams are now at a crossroads. This shift is not just a product update — it’s a turning point that will reshape how businesses budget, design, and maintain their virtual infrastructure.
💥 Rising Licensing Costs Are Reshaping IT Budgets
With the end of vSphere Standard, customers are left with only high-end options like Enterprise Plus, vSphere Foundation, and VMware Cloud Foundation. Take vSphere Foundation as an example:
- Minimum license starts at 72 CPU cores
- NT$7,500 per core per year (based on Broadcom’s pricing)
- Total: over NT$540,000 annually, regardless of actual usage
This rigid pricing model forces businesses to overpay for features they may not need, placing serious pressure on IT budgets.
✅ Why Hualiteq Recommends Proxmox VE as a Strategic Alternative
To help businesses regain control, Hualiteq recommends evaluating Proxmox VE — a powerful, open-source virtualization platform that integrates KVM, LXC, and software-defined storage/networking in a single interface.
- Key Advantages of Proxmox VE:
No Licensing Fees
Fully open-source core platform
No per-core, per-host, or memory-based charges
Significantly reduces Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) - Built-In Hyperconverged Capabilities
Supports ZFS, Ceph, and LVM natively
Ideal for building scalable software-defined storage (SDS) - High Performance and Lightweight
Powered by KVM and LXC
Near bare-metal performance
Perfect for consolidating underutilized VMs
VMware vs. Proxmox Comparison (Conceptual)
To avoid the risks of being highly dependent on a single supplier in the future, Huahou recommends that companies consider takingHybrid virtualization architectureStrategy, gradually introduce Proxmox VE Such an open source platform serves as an alternative main force to improve flexibility and controllability.
Why choose Proxmox VE?
| Technical aspects | Proxmox VE Features |
|---|---|
| Authorization Mode | Open source and free, only paid subscription service support is required, not tied to the number of cores/hosts, avoiding vendor lock-in |
| Virtualization Technology Basics | Adopts KVM (full virtualization) and LXC (lightweight container) dual core, with high scalability |
| Storage Integration Capabilities | Native support for ZFS, Ceph, LVM, and NFS, suitable for building HCI architecture and software-defined storage (SDS) |
| Network configuration flexibility | Use Linux Bridge or OVS, support VLAN Tagging, NIC bonding, SDN module |
| HA and Redundancy | Built-in HA cluster, Live Migration, backup and restore, snapshot, Thin Provisioning and other functions |
| Management interface and maintenance | A single Web UI can unify operations on VM, storage, and network, supports RESTful API, and is automation and DevOps friendly |
🔧 Huahou introduction service: complete support from planning to implementation
As IT architecture upgrade consultant for many organizations in Taiwan, we can provide the following complete import process:
- Environmental inspection and resource inventory
Helps identify zombie VMs, resource allocation anomalies, storage bottlenecks, and over-performance issues - Technology Assessment and POC Planning
Perform a Proxmox test migration on an existing virtualization environment and import a small cluster to verify compatibility and performance - Migration execution and conversion tool usage
applicationqemu-img,virt-v2vor PBS backup server, combined with incremental migration to reduce downtime risk - Education and training and managed maintenance services
Assist IT teams to familiarize themselves with Proxmox operation and monitoring, and provide long-term maintenance support and upgrade consulting services
🎯 Future plans: Improve flexibility, reduce costs, and strengthen control
By integrating VMware environments with the Proxmox platform, enterprises can:
- Migrate low-load or non-critical VMs to improve overall host utilization
- Establish a second high-availability virtualization platform to avoid technical and licensing risks
- Optimize virtualization cost structure in the long term to avoid annual expenditure surges due to policy changes
Hualiteq International Corp.
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