Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, completed in late 2023, changed the game for many Swiss companies. Perpetual licenses replaced by subscriptions, product lines reorganized into broader bundles, and a bill that climbs at every renewal. For a Swiss SME or mid-market firm, the question is no longer theoretical: stay, switch hypervisor, or take the opportunity to move to a sovereign cloud?
What changed with Broadcom
Three shifts concentrate most of the pain. First, the move to subscription: what you bought once is now paid every year. Second, the catalog was simplified into a few bundles, which pushes you to buy components you do not use. Third, the revised terms for partners and smaller accounts, which narrowed room to negotiate.
The concrete result in the field: renewals whose total cost rises sharply, often with no new value in return. That is exactly the buying trigger pushing Swiss IT leaders to reopen the file on their virtualization infrastructure.
Three possible paths
Stay on VMware. Defensible if your contract is far from renewal or if a strong dependency (tooling, certifications, critical applications) makes a near-term move risky. But it is a bet on a pricing trajectory you do not control.
Switch hypervisor. Proxmox VE, Nutanix or others keep a classic virtualization model. You cut the license bill, but you stay in a "virtual machine" logic and you carry the operations yourself.
Move to a sovereign cloud. This is the option that turns the constraint into an advantage: you leave single-vendor dependency, you gain elasticity, and you can pick an operator whose data stays in Switzerland.
Hikube, the sovereign and complete alternative
Many alternatives cover only one brick. Hikube, the sovereign cloud platform operated by Hidora from Geneva, covers everything a VMware estate did, and more:
- Cloud Instances on Linux and Windows, to take over your VMs without rewriting applications;
- managed Kubernetes to progressively modernize the workloads that fit;
- S3-compatible object storage, managed databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis) and on-demand GPU;
- all on open-source CNCF technologies, replicated across three Swiss datacenters.
Two points matter especially in the Broadcom context. First, no vendor lock-in: your Kubernetes manifests, Terraform modules and configurations stay portable. Second, sovereignty: your data, backups and logs never leave Switzerland, and operations are handled by a Swiss team with no offshore subcontracting.
How a migration unfolds
The migration does not happen in one block. Our approach starts with an audit of the existing estate: VM inventory, dependency mapping, identification of critical applications and risks. Then a wave-based cutover: VMs are lifted and shifted onto Hikube, without service interruption, with a run-in period where the old and new environments coexist.
Where relevant, part of the workload is modernized into containers for more elasticity and lower operating costs. But modernization is never a prerequisite: we first secure the exit from VMware, then optimize.
The right time to decide
The worst time to reopen the file is three weeks before the renewal deadline, when pressure makes you sign blind. The right time is now: audit, price the Broadcom renewal, compare it to a sovereign cloud path, and decide with a cool head.
If you want to frame that comparison on your real estate, our engineers in Geneva run this infrastructure audit and hand you a prioritized roadmap. No commitment, and with a team you can actually call.
CEO & Co-founder
Founder of Hidora, passionate about cloud-native and Swiss digital sovereignty. 15+ years in the cloud ecosystem.
