Your VMware Exit — Phased and Verified
Migrate from VMware to OpenStack on your terms: assessment, landing zone, pilot, waves, steady state — with success fees on invoice-verified savings. Your renewal quote is the baseline.
Why Now: The Broadcom Math
Post-Broadcom, VMware renewals average 2.8× the prior cost — with reported increases from 1.8× to 8×.
Perpetual licenses are gone; everything is subscription, per-core, with a 72-core minimum and a 20% late-renewal surcharge. Gartner finds 74% of IT leaders evaluating alternatives and projects 35% of VMware workloads will move by 2028. Your renewal quote is the easiest savings baseline in history to document — and OpenStack plus our managed operations beats it on an all-in basis.
The Program
Assessment & TCO Baseline — $15–25k fixed
Workload inventory, dependency mapping, and a written TCO baseline against your renewal quote. 2–3 weeks. You keep the document, whoever you hire.
Landing Zone — from $45,000
Production-grade OpenStack + Ceph + Kubernetes + Terraform, built to reference architecture — up to 12 nodes, then $3,500–5,000/node.
Pilot Cluster
Real workloads, real failure drills, rollback tested. The platform proves itself before anything depends on it.
Wave Migrations — $150–400/workload
Scheduled in maintenance windows, live migration where the source supports it, rollback path per wave. Complexity-banded, published.
Steady State — from $500/node/mo
Managed private cloud including 24/7 operations — priced per node (a node = a physical server host in your cloud). Or full handover to your team with runbooks and training. A single 64-core VCF node costs $7,000–10,500/year in licensing alone.
Success Fee — typically 15% of verified savings
Invoice-verified against the written baseline. Capped. We earn more when you save more.
Worked Example
| 500-core estate | VMware Cloud Foundation | QoreLayer Managed OpenStack |
|---|---|---|
| Licensing / platform | ~$67,500/yr (negotiated $135/core) | $0 licensing — open source |
| Operations staff | $150k+/yr VMware admin team | Included — 24/7 NOC |
| All-in annual | ~$220k+ | ~$90k (10 nodes × $750/mo — mid-range of $500–900; 24/7 NOC included, no separate fee) |
| Verified saving | — | ~$130k/yr (≈58%) |
Success fee in this example: 15% of verified year-1 savings, measured against the client's written Broadcom renewal quote — invoices as evidence, capped both ways. Prices last reviewed September 2026.
FAQ
Will migration cause downtime?
The phased approach exists to avoid it: a pilot cluster proves the platform, then workloads move in waves scheduled in maintenance windows — live migration where the source supports it, and a tested rollback path per wave. Nothing moves until rollback is proven.
How much does moving off VMware actually save?
Post-Broadcom renewals average 2.8× prior cost (range 1.8× to 8×), with VCF negotiated at $110–165/core/yr. Typical mid-size estates save 40–70% of infrastructure TCO all-in. The baseline is your own renewal quote, and savings are invoice-verified before any success fee is due — see the governance model.
What happens after the last wave?
Steady state: managed private cloud from $500/node/month including 24/7 operations — or a full handover to your team with documentation, runbooks, and training. For comparison, a single 64-core VCF node costs $7,000–10,500/year in licensing alone, before administrators.
What if we still need VMware during the transition?
Both platforms run in parallel for the duration. Our engineers own the OpenStack side from day one; your team keeps the VMware side until each wave retires it. Training is part of handover — you exit with the skills to own the platform, or you keep us on as the operator.