The Migration Everyone Is Talking About
Broadcom’s acquisition has every IT leader re-examining their virtualization stack. Per CloudBolt’s February 2026 survey of 302 IT decisionmakers, 86% are actively reducing their VMware footprint, but only 4% have fully completed the move, and over 50% have changed strategy twice or more since the acquisition.
That gap between intent and actualization tells a very specific story. Migrating away from VMware isn’t easy and may not lead to the outcomes those leaders were expecting.
To get specific about where these projects go sideways, we built a technical risk matrix drawing on Gartner’s research, our migration playbooks, and real customer post-mortems.
Five Places Migrations Go Sideways
1. The Risk That Surfaces After You’ve Called It Done
What Breaks: Teams declare the migration “done,” budget has been fully assigned, and attention is now on the next thing. Only to discover what didn’t actually make the trip.
Why: GPU/vGPU passthrough and live migration capabilities vary widely by platform and can strictly limit workload mobility, directly threatening uptime. Backup/DR solutions built for VMware often need a full redesign once the APIs change. Restores failing despite backups reporting “success” is a known pattern. Behind both is the same underlying risk: Years of building on and for VMware has set a standard expectation for IT Leaders and admins, leading to assumptions. This manifests itself as a resiliency gap that the company did not plan or budget for.
2. Boot and Disk Conversion
What Breaks: A tool that reports “compatible” isn’t the same as a VM that actually boots on the other side.
Why: converting VMDKs to VHDX or QCOW2, and reconciling BIOS/UEFI/secure boot settings, is where migrations stall. Gartner flags this potential issue, and we’ve seen it firsthand: a hardware-version/EFI mismatch during a replication cutover kept a VM from booting despite the source tooling reporting full compatibility. This stops many migrations until the machines can be fully rebuilt from scratch, and the data migrated at the OS level.
3. Network Construct Mismatch
What Breaks: A VM that migrates cleanly but breaks application connectivity on the other side isn’t successfully migrated.
Why: VMware’s intricate virtualized networking structures and policies don’t map cleanly onto Linux bridges, Hyper-V networking, or SDN alternatives. Learning a fully new network stack and ensuring all routing rules are correctly translated extends migration timelines and increases costs of migrating.
4. Storage, Drivers, and the Automation You Don’t Know You’re Losing
What Breaks: The tags, automation, and policy enforcement that make your environment self-managing don’t travel with the VM by default.
Why: A hypervisor migration does not simply move VMs. It often requires rebuilding the automation and policy structures that provision, protect, monitor, and govern them. Storage policies, network constructs, guest policies, and more may not translate to the target platform. Teams must inventory and recreate those dependencies before cutover, or systems may appear healthy while critical automation quietly fails weeks later.
5. Weak Tooling and the Real Timeline
What Breaks: The 30-to-60-day timeline in a sales deck usually assumes migration tooling that doesn’t fully exist yet.
Why: Many alternative platforms have limited native migration tooling, and some lack resumable sync: a dropped connection mid-transfer means starting over. Add app-level dependency chains, and it’s clear why cross-platform migrations run 18 to 48 months, often while companies pay for both platforms.
A Practical Pre-Migration Checklist
Before committing to a timeline or budget, get real answers, not vendor assurances, on each:
- VM boot/conversion, with rollback snapshots preserved.
- Network constructs (subnets, port groups, firewall rules) validated in test.
- Storage, driver, and automation dependencies catalogued.
- Migration tooling and resumable sync capability confirmed.
- Dependency maps built by business service, not by VM.
- Backup/DR restore and failover tested on the target platform.
- Critical and high-dependency workloads sequenced last, not first.
Where 11:11 Fits In
We’re not saying VMware is the only answer for every organization. Some alternatives are catching up, and for some workloads, moving might make sense. We want to ensure our customers and partners are going in with their eyes open about what migration actually requires.
If you’re considering a move, come talk to us before you lock in a timeline.
