A Dell Services–led, fixed-price migration off Broadcom VMware — onto a Dell APEX / DAP landing zone, powered by the FuturFusion Suite. 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.
Dell Services scopes and delivers a fixed-price migration onto a Dell APEX / DAP landing zone; 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 runs the whole migration to a signed, fixed-price scope — with acceptance criteria you sign to, not a time-and-materials open cheque.
The mandated landing zone is the factory floor. Storage-vendor agnostic and certified across the Dell storage portfolio — you keep your hardware choices.
$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 underwrite a fixed-price outcome. 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, fixed price.
Dell Services runs a fixed-price migration onto the Dell Landing Zone (Dell APEX / DAP), driven by FF Migration Manager inside the Automation Studio blueprint. 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.
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.
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 APEX / DAP landing zone — which Dell requires to underwrite a fixed-price outcome; from there the platform runs on the Dell infrastructure you choose.
The evidence behind the exit — for exec, CFO, CTO and operations audiences. Filter by type; the library grows as we publish.
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 runs the exit at a fixed price; 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 →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.