The case for Microsoft's hypervisor — and why the Broadcom acquisition made this decision easier than ever.
When Broadcom completed its $69 billion acquisition of VMware in late 2023, the product and licensing structure changed almost immediately. Perpetual licenses were eliminated. Per-product purchasing was replaced with bundled subscriptions. Prices for SMB customers increased dramatically — in many cases 3 to 5 times what they had been paying.
For small and mid-sized businesses that had built their infrastructure on VMware, this wasn't a minor inconvenience. It was a fundamental change to the cost structure of their IT environment — one that forced a real evaluation of alternatives for the first time in years.
Microsoft Hyper-V is that alternative. It's mature, enterprise-proven, deeply integrated with the Microsoft ecosystem most SMBs already rely on, and available at a fraction of the cost of VMware's new subscription model.
Hyper-V is included with Windows Server licensing most organizations already own. Eliminating VMware subscriptions routinely saves SMBs $15,000–$40,000 annually depending on environment size.
Hyper-V is the hypervisor that powers Microsoft Azure. That native relationship enables seamless hybrid cloud, Azure Site Recovery, Azure Backup, and straightforward cloud burst capacity.
Shielded VMs, Secure Boot, virtual TPM, Host Guardian Service, and deep Windows Defender integration give Hyper-V a strong security posture without additional licensing.
Hyper-V Replica provides asynchronous VM replication to a secondary site or Azure at no extra cost. Comparable VMware functionality requires separate licensing that many SMBs simply skip.
If your team manages Windows Server, they already understand the fundamentals. Windows Admin Center, PowerShell, and SCVMM provide powerful management without a steep learning curve.
Hyper-V underpins Azure — one of the world's largest cloud platforms. For SMB workloads, performance and reliability are more than sufficient, with per-VM overhead lower than VMware.
We've refined this process specifically for SMB VMware environments. Every step is designed to protect your data, minimize disruption, and get you running cleanly on Hyper-V.
Complete inventory of your VMware environment — hosts, VMs, storage, network, and application dependencies. We identify complexity early so nothing catches us off guard in production.
Your Hyper-V environment is designed and fully documented before implementation begins. Hardware sizing, cluster topology, network design, and storage architecture all resolved upfront.
Test VM conversions and application behavior in a controlled environment. Any compatibility issues are resolved here — not during a production cutover window.
Workloads migrate in prioritized waves — non-critical first, business-critical last. Rollback capability is maintained throughout. Your business stays operational.
Every workload validated against pre-migration performance baselines. Complete documentation delivered. Knowledge transferred to your team. Job done.
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