“Hyper-V? That’s legacy tech. It can’t compete with VMware. ‘Hyper-V is dead,’ isn’t it?”
I’ve heard this sentiment more times than I can count. In hallway conversations at conferences, in architecture review meetings, in vendor comparison spreadsheets filled with red X marks in the Hyper-V column. For years, this perception has been the default position—sometimes justified, often not.
In this third post of the Hyper-V Renaissance series, we’re going to dismantle this myth systematically.
The invoice arrived, and the meeting quickly followed.
For nearly two decades, the “cost of virtualization” was a line item we grumbled about but accepted. It was the “VMware Tax,” the price of admission for a stable, feature-rich datacenter. But in the wake of the Broadcom acquisition and the subsequent licensing overhaul, that tax has, for many organizations, turned into a ransom.
This isn’t just about price hikes. It’s about a fundamental shift in how infrastructure is consumed.
Introduction A Perfect Storm Creates Opportunity If you’ve been watching the virtualization market over the past eighteen months, you’ve witnessed something extraordinary: a once-stable industry thrown into chaos by a single acquisition. When Broadcom completed its $69 billion purchase of VMware in November 2023, few anticipated how dramatically—and rapidly—the landscape would shift. What followed wasn’t just a pricing adjustment; it was a fundamental restructuring that has sent shockwaves through data centers worldwide.
