Broadcom completed its $69 billion VMware acquisition in November 2023 and within weeks eliminated every perpetual license. Customers moved to subscription-only terms, forcing small deployments into bundles sized for enterprise. Standalone vSphere customers reported price increases of 800 to 1,500%. AT&T sued after receiving a quote representing a 1,050% increase. Customers already running the full VMware Cloud Foundation bundle — vSphere plus vSAN plus NSX — saw prices hold roughly flat or fall around 50%, but anyone running vSphere on its own absorbed the full shock.
A CloudBolt survey published in early 2026 found that 86% of respondents were reducing their VMware footprints, with just over half planning phased transitions rather than full replacements.
Where teams are landing
Proxmox is the clearest beneficiary. Community subscriptions and forum traffic grew substantially after the Broadcom announcement, and it is consistently the first alternative named in VMware migration threads across r/sysadmin, r/homelab, and enterprise IT forums. Proxmox is open source, runs on the same x86 hardware VMware ran on, and manages VMs and containers through a familiar web interface with no licensing floor.
Other destinations include Nutanix, which has been pointed in its VMware-refugee marketing, OpenStack for teams already familiar with it, and public cloud for workloads where on-premise was never a compliance requirement.
The gap Proxmox does not fill
Proxmox replaces the hypervisor and gives you a working KVM environment. It does not give you the AWS API surface.
Teams that spent years building Terraform modules against the AWS provider, writing IAM policies, running eksctl for Kubernetes cluster provisioning, and scripting against the AWS CLI now face a choice: learn a new operational model on Proxmox from scratch, or find something that brings the API surface they already know to the hardware they are migrating to.
Spinifex (github.com/mulgadc/spinifex, AGPL-3.0, Go) runs on standard Linux bare metal, which means it runs on the same hardware you are already evaluating for your post-VMware migration. It implements EC2, S3, IAM, EKS, ECS, ECR, VPC, and EBS through the AWS API that your existing tooling already speaks. A Terraform config that provisions infrastructure on AWS provisions the same infrastructure on Spinifex with a single provider endpoint override. The eksctl and kubectl workflows, the IAM role structures, the AWS CLI scripts all run unchanged.
Teams rebuilding private cloud after VMware need a hypervisor to replace vSphere and an operational model to replace the management layer they had built around it. Proxmox answers the first question. For teams whose operational model was built on AWS tooling, Spinifex answers the second.
The licensing parallel
Broadcom's move from perpetual licences to subscription minimums is worth noting because it shapes how teams evaluate everything that comes after VMware. Spinifex is AGPL-3.0, meaning the source is available, auditable, and free to use with no minimum core count and no subscription floor. Documentation including the multi-node setup guide and hardware reference architectures is at docs.mulgadc.com.
For teams that watched a perpetual VMware licence turn into an 800% price increase, the AGPL licence and open source development model is not a footnote.
Get started
Spinifex documentation, including the multi-node setup guide and hardware reference architectures, is at docs.mulgadc.com. The source is at GitHub, AGPL-3.0 licensed and written in Go. Or sign up for the free sandbox to explore the AWS-compatible API surface before deploying on your own hardware.
