Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware turned a stable line item into a live budget event. For public-sector and defense estates — often large, regulated, and slow to change — the reflex is to negotiate. The more durable move is to remove the dependency.
Reframe the problem
The licence cost is the symptom. The real exposure is strategic: your core virtualization layer is controlled by a foreign vendor who can reprice or repackage it at will. That is the opposite of sovereignty.
The open-source path
You do not have to choose between “keep paying” and “rewrite everything into containers”:
- KubeVirt runs your existing VMs as first-class workloads on Kubernetes.
- Kube-OVN provides the software-defined networking.
- The same platform also schedules containers and GPU/AI workloads, so you converge two worlds onto one sovereign stack.
Because it is open source and self-hosted, the licence lever disappears — and so does the foreign control point.
A staged migration
A credible exit is an engineering programme, not a leap:
- Assess the estate — VM inventory, dependencies, storage and network coupling.
- Stand up the target platform alongside the incumbent.
- Migrate in waves, using live migration and HA to keep the operational model your teams know.
- Decommission VMware licences as workloads move.
Honest scoping. Migration effort depends heavily on how coupled your VMs are to VMware-specific features. We would rather assess your real estate than promise a timeline we can't stand behind.
What to evaluate
- Do your VMs run without an application rewrite?
- Are live migration and HA supported at your scale?
- Can VMs, containers, and GPU workloads share one platform and one control plane?
- Is the whole stack open source and self-hostable — including air-gapped?
See Sovereign VMs for how the platform delivers this.