June 16, 2025 — 18:42

Author: silver  Category: virtualization  Comments: Off

Work in progress (dec-2024)

Last update: jun-2025

Product list

List of other virtualization platforms to replace (parts of) VMware Sphere.

Vendor / Product	HV	Notes
“The big boys”
XCP-ng	xen	➡ XenServer fork (Vates offers Support) ✔ management appliance available (“XO”)
Oracle Virtualization (VM Server and Linux KVM)	kvm	➡ Oracle Linux KVM is based on oVirt
RedHat OpenShift / OKD	kvm	➡ focuses on k8s ➡ has vm addon “OpenShift Virtualization”
Nutanix Cloud Platform	ahv
OpenStack	multiple	➡ complex to setup and maintain
Apache CloudStack	multiple	➡ OSS ✖ needs specific hardware
Azure Local	hyperv	➡ run vm’s and select azure services onprem ➡ formerly “azure stack hci”
“Second tier“
Proxmox Virtual Environment	kvm	➡ uses debian, linux, novnc etc ✖ seems to be aimed at smaller env’s ✖ outdated management webui
OpenNebula	kvm	➡ touted as vcloud replacement ✔ webui, user/tenant self service
Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure	multiple	➡ based on openstack
“New / lesser-known“
Harvester HCI	kvm	➡ built on k8s ➡ formerly “suse virtualization”
Sangfor HCI	xen	➡ chinese company
VergeOS	kvm
Scale Computing	kvm
Triton	kvm	➡ originally developed by Joyent ➡ solaris/illumos based
Platform 9	kvm
HPE VM Essentials	kvm

Not included: public cloud

Platform

Everything else besides vSphere in VMware ecosystem e.g. vSAN, vCenter, PowerCLI and Aria (Automation, Operations, Logs/vRLI). Similar tooling and automation offered by these alternatives or other 3rd party replacements.

Storage

Options to replace vSAN / switch to NAS or SAN:

• SDS: CEPH, Cloudian, Starwind VSAN or zVault (NAS)
• Hardware: DDN/Trintri (NAS), NetApp (NAS), TrueNAS, Pure Storage, HPE, IBM or Dell

Management

• Azure Local: like cloud (Arc control plane)
• XCP-NG: Xen Orchestra (multiple hosts)
• Harvester: Rancher
• ManageIQ can manage OpenStack and OpenShift/K8s platforms

IaC

• Terraform supports most vendors
• Ansible supports most vendors

Scripting

• Azure Local: PowerShell
• XCP-ng: xe cli tool (local)
• ProxmoxVE: Bash(?)

Backup

• Veeam supports Hyper-V, Proxmox VE and XCP-NG
• Commvault supports Proxmox VE

Logging

A few “DIY” centralized logging examples are Elastic (ELK stack), InfluxDB (TICK stack), Grafana Loki, Splunk and GrayLog

API

• Proxmox VE API (REST). Clients: most popular languages
• OpenNebula API (XML-RPC), Clients: Java, Go …
• Nutanix REST APIs and SDK (Python, Java, Go, JS)
• OpenShift: API based on k8s
• XCP-ng: “XAPI” or Orchestra API
• CloudStack API
• Azure Local API (REST)

More information

Links

• https://www.theregister.com/Tag/VMWare
• https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=vmware+alternative

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant

From older research reports, to get an idea about market trends

Hyperconverged Infrastructure Software

File and Object Storage Platforms