2024-25 Top 5 SMB/Edge VMware vSphere Alternatives Solutions

Published on August 15, 2024, this market report was written by Jerome M Wendt, principal analyst, Todd Dorsey, senior analyst, and Ken Clipperton, principal researcher, at Data Center Intelligence Group LLC (DCIG).

2024-25 DCIG TOP 5 SMB/Edge VMware vSphere Alternatives Solutions Report Now Available
Free Inaugural Report Offers Smaller Organizations Path Forward with Viable vSphere Alternatives

DCIG is announced the availability of the 2024-25 DCIG TOP 5 SMB/Edge VMware vSphere Alternatives Report. This report provides guidance on the DCIG TOP 5 VMware vSphere alternative solutions that smaller organizations should consider as they address Broadcom’s recent changes to VMware’s software licensing. The report is available for free download.

SMBs and organizations with edge environments possess different requirements for a VMware vSphere alternative than enterprises. They still need a vSphere alternative to offer specific core features. These include HA, product reliability, SDS, software-defined networking, and the ability to host Windows and Linux guest OSes. They also often look to the provider to deliver education, training, and 24x7x365 technical support.

However, the need to scale the solution to support the highest levels of capacity, networking, and processing may not exist. SMBs and edge sites tend not to run applications and workloads that test the technical limits of the solutions that host them. Further, SMBs and edge sites tend to less frequently experience sudden growth or performance spikes.

These differing, and generally lower, expectations for a hypervisor provided the impetus for these organizations to make a change. Broadcom’s decision to reduce the number of VMware software licenses only contributes their willingness to explore other options.

The good news: multiple such alternative solutions exist that may cost less than half of VMware vSphere’s new subscription-based pricing. Further, many of these solutions include software utilities that simplify VM migrations from vSphere to their platform.

In preparing this report, DCIG formally evaluated 15 different VMware vSphere alternative solutions based on multiple different features and capabilities. The general categories under which the features of these SMB/Edge VMware vSphere alternative solutions fell included:

Data protection and security
Deployments options
Licensing and pricing
Management
Software options
Technical support

Based on these criteria, DCIG awarded the following VMware vSphere alternative solutions a DCIG TOP 5 ranking in the SMB/Edge Edition:

HiveIO Hive Fabric
NodeWeaver
Scale Computing Platform (SC//Platform)
StorMagic SvHCI
VergeIO VergeOS

A list of all 15 SMB/Edge VMware vSphere alternatives evaluated.

ArcherOS
Harvester
HiveIO Hive Fabric
NodeWeaver
oVirt
Proxmox Virtual Environment
Sangfor HCI
Scale Computing SC//Platform
SmartX HCI
SoftIron VM Squared
StorMagic SvHCI
Sunlight HyperConverged Edge
VergeIO VergeOS
Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure
Xen Orchestra

“DCIG’s latest TOP 5 report tackles the market turmoil presented by Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, which is causing headaches for SMB customers and enterprises with many edge locations,” said Bruce Kornfeld, chief product officer, StorMagic, Inc. “StorMagic SvHCI is a full-stack hyperconverged solution that can help customers save up to 62% over VMware.“