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September 24, 2025 — 18:42

Author: silver Category: virtualization Comments: Off

Work in progress (dec-2024)

Last update: January 2026

Product list

List of virtualization platforms to completely or partially replace VMware Sphere (aimed at “any” enterprise environment besides “small”)

Vendor / Product	HV	Notes

“The big boys”

IBM RedHat OpenShift / OKD	kvm	➡ Kubernetes distro ➡ has VM addon “OCPv” ➡ OCPv is based on KubeVirt operator
OpenStack	multiple	➡ complex to setup and maintain
XCP-ng	xen	➡ XenServer fork (Vates offers Support) ✔ management appliance available (“XO”) ✖ product seems “unfinished” at best
Oracle Virtualization	kvm	➡ “VM Server” and “Linux KVM” ➡ “Linux KVM” is based on oVirt
Nutanix Cloud Platform	ahv
Apache CloudStack	multiple	➡ OSS ✖ needs specific hardware
Azure Local	hyperv	➡ run vm’s and select azure services on-prem ➡ formerly “azure stack hci”

“Second tier“

SUSE Harvester HCI	kvm	➡ built on Kubenetes and KubeVirt ➡ formerly “SUSE Virtualization” ➡ integrates with Rancher ✖ complicated licensing
Proxmox Virtual Environment	kvm	➡ uses debian, linux, novnc etc ✖ seems to be aimed at smaller env’s ✖ outdated management webui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 ✔ nice webui, user/tenant self service
Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure	multiple	➡ based on openstack

“New and lesser-known players“

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

Shortlist

Currently it seems migrating to RedHat’s OCP (and OCPv) is a popular option.

In general, a Kubernetes distro with KubeVirt is a solid choice. The KubeVirt project was initiated in 2016 by RedHat to run KVM vm’s as native k8s objects. Besides OCP there are multiple other products available such as Harvester or “vanilla” k8s.

It benefits from the large k8s landscape (storage, networking etc). Also, combining k8s with kubevirt makes it possible to run both containers and vm’s in a cluster (on bare metal) with somewhat similar functionality as VMware Tanzu.

Ecosystem

Besides VMware’s ESX Hypervisor & vSphere there’s alternatives for vSAN, vCenter, PowerCLI and Aria (Automation, Operations, Logs/vRLI) below.

Storage

Options to replace vSAN or switch to NAS/SAN:

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

Management

vCenter-like products

Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console can deploy and manage OpenShift clusters
Azure Local works like Azure Cloud (Arc control plane)
Xen Orchestra can manage multiple XCP-NG hosts
SUSE Rancher can manage Kubernetes and Harvester:
Red Hat ManageIQ: OpenStack and OpenShift/Kubernetes platforms

IaC

HashiCorp Terraform / OSS OpenTofu support most vendors
Red Hat Ansible supports most vendors
Pulumi if you want use a programming language like Python

Note that Salt(Stack) was acquired by VMware/Broadcom

CLI & scripting

Azure Local: PowerShell
XCP-ng: xe cli tool (local)
Kubernetes: kubectl cli tool
OpenShift: oc cli tool, Ansible
ProxmoxVE: bash, Helper-Scripts

Backup

Veeam
- Hyper-V
- Proxmox VE
- Kasten supports Kubernetes
Commvault
- Proxmox VE
- Kubernetes (since Jan 2026)

Logging

Centralized logging (“DIY”):

Elastic (ELK stack)
InfluxDB (TICK stack)
Grafana Loki
Splunk
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)
XCP-ng: “XAPI” or Orchestra API
CloudStack API
Azure Local API (REST)
Kubernetes API (OCP, Harvester, KubeVirt)

More information

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant

From research reports, to get an idea about market trends

Hyperconverged Infrastructure Software

File and Object Storage Platforms