A market in transition
For more than two decades, VMware defined enterprise virtualization — and earned that position through genuine reliability, broad ecosystem support, and the accumulated trust of IT teams who built their careers on it.
Broadcom’s 2023 acquisition changed the calculation. The pricing restructures that followed left many organizations — particularly smaller government agencies, utilities, and mid-market manufacturers — absorbing cost increases on timelines they didn’t control. IT leaders who had never seriously evaluated alternatives began doing so. That shift is now visible in the deployment data.
“Two years in, IT leaders have stopped asking ‘Will this hurt?’ and started asking ‘What does it take to get out?'”
— CloudBolt, VMware & Broadcom: Two Years After the Acquisition, January 2026. Survey of 302 North American IT decision-makers in enterprises with 1,000+ employees.
What the numbers show
VMware’s global installed base remains large — and in enterprises with 500+ employees, inertia is real. Deep integrations, long procurement cycles, and institutional familiarity create genuine switching costs. For many large organizations, staying put is the rational decision, at least for now.
The picture looks different among smaller organizations. Estimated host deployments for companies under 250 employees show VMware declining sharply while KVM/Proxmox has more than doubled over the same period — and is still accelerating:
Source: Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH (deployed host figures); Saturn ME / PeerSpot 2025 market analysis; AllConnected internal estimates based on published market data. SME = organizations with fewer than 250 employees.
Cities, water districts, manufacturers, and mid-market businesses — organizations that look a lot like AllConnected’s clients — are making different calculations than their enterprise counterparts. The trajectory of that shift matters as much as the current snapshot.
Why Proxmox has earned serious consideration
AllConnected evaluated Proxmox rigorously before recommending it. What the platform delivers for the organizations we serve:
Transparent, stable pricing
Proxmox’s licensing model is straightforward. Organizations know what they’re paying — now and when they scale. No per-CPU surprises, no mid-cycle restructures.
Enterprise-grade availability
High availability clustering, live migration, and production-grade failover are built in. Proxmox is running critical workloads in enterprise environments worldwide.
Vendor-agnostic storage
Proxmox supports the full range of storage architectures your team may already have in place: DAS, iSCSI, Fibre Channel, NFS, and Ceph. Your infrastructure, not ours.
Near feature parity with VMware
The feature gap has closed significantly. For most operational workloads, Proxmox delivers comparable capability — without comparable licensing overhead.
Proxmox has earned adoption in public sector agencies, critical infrastructure, and regulated industries — environments where stability isn’t a preference, it’s a requirement.
What AllConnected’s Proxmox partnership means for you
Our partnership with Proxmox isn’t a pivot. It’s an addition to how we support clients who need infrastructure that is resilient, manageable, and cost-effective over the long term.
If you’re renewing a VMware contract and wondering whether now is a good time to evaluate alternatives — we can help you think through that honestly. If you’re building new infrastructure and want to understand your options before committing, that’s a conversation worth having.
AllConnected will deploy, manage, and support Proxmox environments with the same operational discipline we bring to every infrastructure engagement: documented standards, proactive monitoring through our NOC, and local support from engineers who know your environment.
We’re also continuing to invest in the full picture of what virtualization infrastructure requires — backup architecture, workload migration planning, and operational continuity. Where we have capability today, we’ll deploy it. Where we’re still building, we’ll tell you that directly.
Start with a conversation
If you’re evaluating your virtualization strategy — whether you’re looking at renewal costs, planning new infrastructure, or simply want to understand what the market shift means for your environment — we’d welcome the chance to talk through it.
There’s no obligation in asking questions. That’s what we’re here for.
www.allconnected.com