A Dell Services–led migration off Broadcom VMware — onto a Dell APEX / DAP landing zone, powered by the FuturFusion Suite, under a SoW tailored to your estate. Heritage and crown-jewel applications move intact whatever the version-locked guest OS or NSX policy: no re-IP, no re-platform, no business-process change. Built by VMware engineers, for VMware engineers.
Leaving VMware is a risk decision, and price is only the proof. Four separate cliffs are arriving together — and for a customer on VCF 8 and older hardware, all four land inside roughly 18–24 months. Broadcom's sanctioned answer — new hardware plus re-written applications — is a multi-year, $150–250M programme per enterprise or government account.
Perpetual vSphere is out of support outside subscription. VCF 9.x is mandatory for security updates — a forced upgrade with cost and disruption attached.
VCF 9.x drops guest customisation for pre-2016 Windows Server and older RHEL/SLES. VCF 10.x (~2028) is expected to remove CVE patching for these guests entirely.
Skylake-SP is blocked in the VCF 9 installer (RPQ-only, software-only support); Cascade Lake is deprecated — a forced hardware refresh on Broadcom's timeline.
Since 1 Nov 2025 no hyperscaler bundles VMware — BYOL only. AVS included-licence PayGo sunsets 31 Oct 2026. The "come to our native" answer means Hyper-V/KVM lock-in and broken legacy apps.
Compounded, they are one deadline, not four. There is no safe stillness: standing on an out-of-support hypervisor under a regulated estate is a direct NIS2, DORA and ISO 27001 failure. The choice is not whether to move — it is whether the move is controlled and funded, or forced and expensive.
Scored on shipping product — not roadmap, not marketing — across the capabilities a VMware exit actually depends on.
The 2026 independent comparison scored every credible private-cloud stack against the same twelve-axis rubric used by VMware exit committees. VCF 9 is the reference baseline customers are leaving, so it isn't ranked.
Dell Services deliver the migration onto a Dell APEX / DAP landing zone under a SoW tailored to your estate — scoped around retaining your workflow processes, your current integrations and your existing hardware platforms. The FuturFusion Suite is the embedded engine that replaces the VMware stack. You keep running today's estate and pay once workloads are live — the risk sits with Dell and FuturFusion, not with you.
Dell Services scope the engagement to what you actually run — workflow processes retained, current integrations rebuilt to a working outcome, existing hardware platforms carried forward, with acceptance criteria you sign to.
A Dell compute and storage landing zone is the factory floor — that is what Dell needs to deliver the work. Your own choice of compute, network and storage is supported and carries through unchanged.
$80/core all-in vs Broadcom's ~$700 real wallet — roughly 70% less, on an Apache-2.0 substrate with no kill-switch.
Over five years, as workloads go live. Keep running the current estate through the move; the forward spend drops by ~70%.
Every migration and integration runs through DAP Automation Studio — the landing zone is what lets Dell scope, sequence and stand behind the migration. Once workloads are live, the 20–30% is handed back for burst, DR, dev/test, or the next refresh pool — however you like.
This is the estate everyone else asks you to re-write — and the one thing the Dell + FuturFusion Suite preserves that no rival platform can match.
Every VMware exit is one of five plays — and they all run through the same Dell-led factory. Each carries its own trigger and defensible answer; explore any of them below.
Guest-OS deprecation on VCF 9/10.x; apps that can't be re-written.
Preserve bit-for-bit + 10-yr host support.
BYOL since Nov '25; AVS cliff 31 Oct '26; native can't carry DFW/vSAN.
Dell on-prem — the only viable exit; heritage kept, ~70% saved.
VCSP white-label sunset; no on-ramp left for mid-sized providers.
A multi-tenant platform of their own, into the sovereign-cloud market.
Copper switch-off consolidates exchanges; NFV on VMware Telco Cloud.
The funded consolidation pays for the platform change.
Enterprise & government leaving Broadcom outright.
One factory, every workload, one tailored SoW.
Dell Services deliver the migration onto the Dell compute and storage landing zone (Dell APEX / DAP), driven by FF Migration Manager inside the Automation Studio blueprint, under a SoW tailored to your estate. Your vSphere, vCenter and NSX estate — including the older applications on legacy guest OSes that VCF 9.x abandons — moves with no deprecation, no loss of support for legacy hardware, and no business-process change. Step through it below, then see it re-cut for each play.
Day-0 inventory — apps, guests, dependencies. Waves sequenced, crown jewels last.
Dell APEX / DAP at 20–30% of cores + the Automation Studio blueprint — the factory floor for the exit.
FF Migration Manager brings vSphere / vCenter / NSX across. Guests preserved; re-IP/re-MAC only where the network domain changes.
vRA/vRO replicated in Aether; ServiceNow, Commvault and estate integrations rebuilt to a working outcome.
Residency support, then hand-back. The 20–30% landing-zone capacity is released to you for re-use.
Most customers with 3–4 years left on a Broadcom ELA feel safe — they believe they've bought time. The contract locks neither the price, the terms, nor you.
Stand up the FF Suite + Dell landing zone and migrate the at-risk heritage estate while it's still supported — patchable, secured, preserved.
Dell Services completes the full exit during the contract term — no waiting for renewal, no forced VCF 9.x upgrade.
Issue the 30–90 day Termination for Convenience notice as a planned step — redirect committed budget, free ~70% of forward spend.
The "safe" contract already carries hidden VCF 9.x cost — the vDefend firewall add-on, peak-core true-ups, and a metering uplift that land whether you move or not. Waiting doesn't avoid the spend; it just delays the decision. Moving to the Dell + FuturFusion Suite releases 70–80% of that budget to redirect where it belongs: innovation, resilience, and value to the people you serve.
| Reference · illustrative | Scale | VMware · 5-yr | FuturFusion · 5-yr | Saving |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Enterpriseheritage estate · NSX-T · mixed guest OSes | 15,000 | ~$20.3M | ~$6.0M | ~$14.3M · ~70% |
| Governmentregulated · legacy applications preserved | 30,000 | ~$40.5M | ~$12.0M | ~$28.5M · ~70% |
| Delivered reference~16,000-VM estate · migrated intact, zero re-IP | 16,000 VMs | — | — | Full estate preserved · legacy retained |
Basis: corrected VMware list less discount vs the Dell + FuturFusion Suite, which bundles the load balancer (AVI-class), distributed firewall (NSX-class), NDR and multi-tenancy at no extra SKU. The one honest gap is no first-party vSAN equivalent — vSAN ESA is itself a paid VCF component — so storage is software-defined, storage-vendor agnostic, and certified across the Dell storage portfolio. Figures illustrative; not a quotation.
Many heritage estates quietly run the distributed firewall — enabled years ago as "included" when VMware pushed NSX micro-segmentation. Under Broadcom that firewall is vDefend: a separately-licensed, per-core add-on, and the VCF 9.x usage audit surfaces it as new, metered spend, compounded by peak-core true-ups. Move the at-risk estate to the FuturFusion Suite before the first usage-reporting cycle and those cores leave Broadcom's metered scope — avoiding the vDefend charge and the true-up, on top of the ~70% migration saving.
The Suite is what runs inside the Dell-led factory. An optional multi-tenant control plane over immutable HypervisorOS hosts with FF Incus built in for VMs and containers — plus the operational layer to run a fleet of clusters and the migrator that brings your VMware estate over intact. A commercial, hardened, enterprise-supported LTS.
The optional unified UI that replaces vCenter, NSX Manager, Aria, vCloud Director and HCX. Owns tenancy, RBAC, distributed firewall, load balancing, backup and NDR.
Debian-13 mkosi-built immutable appliance with FF Incus built in. KVM/QEMU VMs and OCI/LXC containers, live migration on dqlite; A/B signed updates, TPM-measured boot, LUKS, ZFS, no SSH.
Multi-cluster provisioning and lifecycle. Registers HypervisorOS servers, drives A/B updates, provisions FF Incus clusters via Terraform, and mirrors estate inventory.
vCenter source, FF Incus target, VDDK + CBT warm-incremental copy, batched migrations, post-import fixups. Uniquely, imports NSX-V and NSX-T firewall rules into OVN ACLs alongside the VMs.
Rival platforms ship canned scripts for Red Hat, Nutanix and — soon — VMware, and imply that set is all they support. Automation Studio is the opposite: a single, open integration point for everything you run — FF Aether and FF Migration Manager, ServiceNow, your CMDB, your IdP, your own tooling. Nothing is off the table, and nothing is locked to a vendor's pre-written list.
Other stacks split day-2 across vSphere Client, Operations, Automation, SDDC Manager, Avi, K8s consoles, NDR appliances and third-party backup UIs. Aether consolidates every domain into one application. Pick a plane to see what it covers — adopt the Suite, turn on what you need.
ESXi was an immutable, signed-boot, TPM-measured, no-SSH hardened appliance. Almost every VMware "replacement" trades that for a general-purpose Linux with apt or dnf, a writable root and an open SSH port. That's the sentence a security team refuses to sign.
So we built HypervisorOS: a Debian-13 mkosi appliance with signed-UKI Secure Boot measured into TPM PCRs, LUKS-encrypted root, ZFS, and A/B atomic updates via systemd-sysupdate — no SSH on cluster nodes. Upgrades roll one node at a time: drain via live migration, stage the new image, reboot, repeat. The lights stay on.
Firmware verifies a signed shim before any kernel code runs.
Kernel, initrd and cmdline bundled in one signed Unified Kernel Image.
Every stage hashes into TPM PCRs — attestable to the management plane.
Updates land in the inactive slot. Reboot promotes; failure rolls back automatically.
Atomic image swaps, no in-place package management. No SSH. No drift.
The exit is designed for ease of transition. Skills transfer in-flight, not after: the FuturFusion Suite Academy trains Dell pre-sales, partner SMEs and your own VMware engineers alongside the migration, so the estate and the skills move together and you own the platform at hand-back.
vSphere, vCenter and NSX concepts map directly onto Aether. The console is built by VMware engineers, for VMware engineers — the skills your team already holds carry straight across.
Role-based tracks with hands-on DAP labs and certification take your team to the transitional skillset in days and weeks — delivered in-flight, not a multi-month re-training project.
Your team, ways of working and processes continue uninterrupted. Simplify and modernise when it suits the business — everything at your chosen pace.
FuturFusion is a Dell SKU. You buy on Dell paper, under Dell support contracts, with Dell as prime and the single point of contact for escalation, SLAs and lifecycle — FuturFusion the named Emerging Technology Channel subcontractor providing the L2/L3 platform spine behind it.
The boutique-vendor risk that applies to every other VMware alternative doesn't apply here. Same procurement vehicle, same global 24×7 footprint, same hardware partner.
Log one Dell ProSupport case through the entitlement you already run. No stack of community forums, no finger-pointing.
Your VMware-certified engineers re-terminate onto Aether — mapping vSphere and NSX concepts, not re-learning — backed by the FuturFusion Suite Academy.
The Suite is storage-vendor agnostic and certified across all Dell storage. The migration lands on a Dell compute and storage landing zone (Dell APEX / DAP) — which Dell requires to deliver the work; from there the platform runs on the infrastructure you choose, with your compute, network and storage decisions intact.
The evidence behind the exit — a one-page executive brief, an SME-grade technical whitepaper and a deck for every subject. Choose a topic to open its downloads.
A heritage line-of-business application, an NSX-T-dependent app, or a version-locked guest OS — migrated onto the Dell Landing Zone in a lab, with your Dell account team on the call. Dell owns the migration factory and delivers the exit under a SoW tailored to your estate; FuturFusion is the engine — with the potential for payment models to start post Broadcom VMware exit, to match your budgets and cash flow. The risk sits with Dell and FuturFusion, not with you.
A scoping call, a live demo on one of your own workloads, or a place for your engineers on the FuturFusion Academy — each one starts with a single message, and each one runs with your Dell account team alongside. Tell us where you are and we'll take it from there.
Start with a 30-minute scoping call, or bring one real workload — a heritage line-of-business app, an NSX-T-dependent service, a version-locked guest OS — and watch it move onto the Dell Landing Zone in a lab, with your Dell account team on the call.
sales@futurfusion.io →Get your VMware engineers into role-based tracks and hands-on DAP labs — vSphere, vCenter and NSX concepts mapped straight onto Aether, so skills transfer in-flight rather than after. Currently free of charge when paired with a qualified scoping meeting.
engineers@futurfusion.io →For Dell account teams, systems integrators and channel partners who want to bring the Dell-led VMware exit to their customers. Co-sell, enablement, deal support and joint pursuit — Dell prime, FuturFusion the engine.
partners@futurfusion.io →We read every one. Replies come from a person, usually same working day.
Prefer to come through Dell? Your Dell account team can bring us into any existing conversation — FuturFusion is a Dell SKU, quoted and supported on Dell paper.