Wednesday, November 4, 2026 | 12:00pm – 1:00pm EST

Before comparing VMware alternatives, decide what outcome you want from the move. Almost any alternative can swap the hypervisor and cut the VMware licensing burden. Stopping there is the hypervisor swap trap. IT keeps the separate storage, networking and backup products, and two years later faces the same costs and complexity under a new logo.

This session focuses on the Day 2 problems that remain once licensing costs come down. Can each alternative address challenges that matter as much as the licensing savings, and often more?

• Infrastructure complexity: the separate products, consoles and upgrade cycles it takes to run a handful of servers
• Data center inflation: hardware refresh, licensing, support and power costs that climb every year, even when the environment stays the same size
• Distributed data centers: multiple small sites, each with its own servers, that the same small central IT team still has to manage
• AI cost and control: rapidly escalating cloud AI token costs, legitimate data sovereignty concerns, and the high cost of building an internal AI stack

The comparison is built for mid-market IT, meaning 4 to 20 servers in total across all sites and a team of three to five, where one generalist has to run the whole platform. Aaron Richman and Dave Vincent of VergeIO walk through Nutanix, Hyper-V, Proxmox, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, Scale Computing and HPE VM Essentials, then show in a live demo how VergeOS solves all four in a single platform.

• How to define the outcome of a VMware exit before comparing platforms, and why a hypervisor swap alone leaves the hardest problems in place
• Where infrastructure complexity, data center inflation, distributed data centers and AI cost and control add cost to a 4-to-20-server environment
• What a team of three to five needs from a platform compared with a team of 30 to 40, and why one platform run by one generalist matters for the smaller team
• How VergeOS runs virtualization, storage, networking and data protection in one code base, shown live by Dave Vincent

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