This article on Tech Radar reads more like a propaganda piece than a genuine news item, and should be taken with at least a grain of salt.

As with any migration project, there are, of course, risks and costs, but as someone who has extensive experience in virtual machine infrastructure, migrations and system transformations, I assure you that these costs and risks are being overblown by Tech Radar.

The article points out that a majority (52% in September 2024, by now even more) of VMWare customers plan to migrate to alternative virtualisation platforms, but that few have yet done so. This is not surprising, as any major project needs to be planned and costed, budget allocated, new vendors selected, new contracts negotiated with vendors and staff found to perform the migration, and all this takes time.

Migration projects are not inherently more risky than other kinds. In fact, just the opposite: if a migration fails, the problems can be fixed and the migration run again, over and over if necessary. The main technical issue is with data: after migration, the new system needs to be tested before it goes live, during which time the old system continues to be used and continues to receive new data; this is usually solved by doing an incremental migration once testing is successful (any new data in the old system is migrated to the new system), then the new system goes live and the old system is shut down.

Costs are unavoidable, but given that the leading candidates for replacing VMWare are Open Source based, yearly operating costs will be significantly reduced, so capital investment in the migration will be recouped in time; given the price of VMWare, over a rather short time.