Migrating From VMware Will Take 2x–3x Longer Than You Think
When Broadcom bought VMware, most teams didn’t panic.
They still had time left on their contracts and assumed renewals would look roughly the same. Then, renewal quotes landed five to twenty times higher. And the tone shifted fast.
Once the new number hits, leaders realize they have to make a change and have less than a year before renewal. That short runway forces fast decisions, not smart ones.
Teams start treating the migration like a linear project: pick a platform, stand it up, move workloads, and adjust later. They believe demos that make live migration look simple and underestimate what’s actually changing underneath.
We’re not talking about a software swap. You’re rebuilding how your infrastructure runs while still keeping production online. You’re reworking automation, retraining teams, rewriting runbooks, and running dual environments at once.
In practice, it’s better to assume your migration from VMware will take 2x to 3x longer than what your team thinks it will take.
And if you are pressed for time, there is a way to roll it out faster (as long as you know the trade-offs).
Most VMware Migrations Start With Unrealistic Timelines
Most teams don’t start out thinking they can migrate from VMware fast. The short runway makes them believe they can.
If you’re in the middle of a three or five-year agreement, you probably don’t know what renewals will look like. You just know prices are going up.
When the renewal quote finally lands, it’s five times higher (maybe twenty) and now you’ve got nine months left to make a decision. The conversation flips from “Can we get off VMware?” to “We have to get off VMware now!”
At that point, planning gives way to pressure. It’s not grounded in an honest evaluation of effort. It’s the reaction of teams backed into a corner.
There’s no time to evaluate what’s realistic. Confidence fills the gap. Teams convince themselves they can migrate before renewal if they just move fast enough.
They look at alternatives like OpenShift or Nutanix, see a demo of live-migrating VMs, and tell themselves it’s simple. Build the new environment, move the workloads, and learn the interface as they go.
In reality, fewer engineers understand these platforms deeply, and most customers don’t want to hand the build off. They want to shadow it or even drive the keyboard themselves, which adds months. Every question or configuration decision slows progress because it turns what could be a build into a training exercise.
Then, teams think back to when they first stood up VMware (it took a few weeks, maybe a couple of months) and assume the timeline will be the same. But they’ve gone from dozens of VMs to hundreds or thousands.
They also overlook the work that follows: re-IPing networks, rerouting traffic, keeping data synchronized, and moving workloads in controlled groups (not all at once).
Now they’ve got a roadmap that doesn’t match reality.
The Hidden Variables Extending Your VMware Migration
Once teams start working, the gaps show up.
Teams underestimate the build, assuming it can be stood up in a few months, just as VMware did. But few engineers know these platforms deeply, and teams rarely want to hand them off. They shadow the build, ask questions, and sometimes drive the keyboard themselves. That adds time to roll out.
They also underestimate the migration. Yes, automation exists. But this isn’t copy-and-paste. You still have to re-IP, reroute traffic, and keep data synchronized. Workloads move in waves, not all at once.
Teams also underestimate how much has to change. It’s not just a new interface. Terraform, Pulumi, and Ansible all need to be rewritten to work with new API endpoints. Backup, observability, and security have to be rebuilt for Kubernetes-native operation. Traditional byte-for-byte backup tools for VMware need Kubernetes-aware alternatives such as Kasten K10.
None of it maps one-for-one. That turns what looked like a platform build into an operational transformation.
So you end up running three programs at once: the build, the migration, and the rewrite of how infrastructure is managed. For large environments, that’s roughly a year and a half (or more) of real work, especially when engineers can only dedicate part of their time.
The real surprise comes at the end.
Teams expect VMware 2.0. But once everything becomes software-defined, you have to involve security, DR, and development.
The cultural shift slows more programs than technology does. When someone says, “We’ll train later,” they rarely do. The team reverts to old habits, and the platform never gets used as intended.
In most sizable environments, the financial payback often follows the same curve, with savings arriving later than expected.
What Do You Gain by Taking Longer to Migrate Off VMware?
You can light up a new platform fast. You cannot compress adoption without paying for it later. Rushed programs break things. Engineers end up in late-night fire drills. When something fails, the platform gets blamed instead of the plan.
In practice, the work takes 2x to 3x longer than what teams plan.
This gives you room for pilots, rehearsals, and real cutover tests. You also buy time for the hard part: re-adopting how you run infrastructure. Terraform, Pulumi, Ansible, security, backups, and observability all need to be reworked for the target platform. None of it maps one-for-one.
Team bandwidth is a governor. If engineers can only give this 10% to 15% of their week, the schedule stretches 2x to 3x by definition.
Finance may benefit too, since spreading costs across fiscal periods avoids a single-quarter hit. That breathing room also allows proper testing and staged cutovers, rather than a risky, single big-bang weekend.
If you rush to dodge one renewal, you often pay the same later in overtime, rework, and downtime.
If You Still Want a “Fast” Migration, Write The Risk in Ink
You can move fast. But you have to make clear trade-offs (and recognize them as a team). Most importantly, you cannot skip learning and expect stability. So the smart approach is to limit scope—not ignore complexity.
Start small.
Use OpenShift Virt for QA or test workloads first. Keep production in VMware until your team is confident. That’s how you move fast without risking uptime.
Most teams get in trouble because they treat “fast” as “big bang.” They try to move everything at once. In reality, you can stand up a small OpenShift Virt environment fast, move a few workloads, and learn while production stays stable.
You keep pace without creating chaos.
If you push for speed, record the risks. Every shortcut has a cost: skipping training, skipping testing, and skipping documentation. Decide upfront what you’re trading off, and treat it as a business decision rather than something engineering has to absorb quietly.
Remember: even if you choose another hypervisor like Hyper-V or Nutanix, the learning curve does not go away.
The difference might be a bit smaller, but it’s still there. And if OpenShift Virt takes months longer but gives you true infrastructure agility, that’s a better deal than repeating this entire cycle in three years.
Because once you’ve done this the right way, you won’t have to do it again.
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About the author
Derrick Sutherland - Chief Architect at Shadow-Soft
Derrick is a T-shaped technologist who can think broadly and deeply simultaneously. He holds a master's degree in cyber security, develops applications in multiple languages, and is a Kubernetes expert.