713 comments, hand-coded by declared destination, organization scale, platform sentiment, and recurring argument. 189,306 views · 4,550 likes.
Counts anyone running a platform now or actively executing a migration to it. Colour shows organization scale where the commenter revealed it; the dark segment is unstated. Proxmox leads on mentions but Hyper-V is closer than the first read suggested, and VMware's 24 is not all inertia: 15 of those are people explicitly choosing to stay.
Share of each platform's landings that came from enterprise or education, among the 211 commenters who said. OpenShift and Nutanix are enterprise-only. XCP-ng is the opposite. Proxmox is not the SMB-only tool the first sample suggested: a third of its identified landings are enterprise, including 4,000-VM and 3,500-VM estates.
27 commenters named a VM or host count, totalling 82,100 workloads. Counting machines instead of people, Nutanix takes a third of everything moving on the strength of two very large estates, and Hyper-V collapses from 31 mentions to under 5% of workloads. One person equals one vote; one person can also equal 20,000 VMs. Both charts are true and they disagree.
Explicit praise minus explicit criticism, per commenter, independent of what they run. HPE Morpheus is the surprise: net negative, and the criticism is about HPE as a vendor rather than the product.
Recurring arguments across all 653 coded statements.
| Increase | Commenter | Detail | Landed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5,400% | @Dfk429S9fo3 | $600 for three years of ESXi on 3 VMs became a $33,000 renewal quote. Attributed by another commenter to the 96-core minimum. | Unstated |
| ~900% | @Potzii85 | MSP already paying licensing in the millions; quote would have been 9x. Moving every customer. | HPE Morpheus |
| 740% | @mikeyfoofoo | One month to decide despite a support deal to 2027. Paid, then still got a cease and desist. | Unstated |
| 567% | @jonathanbuzzard1376 | University central IT, 75k to 500k per year. Migration hardware paid for itself in a year. | Proxmox |
| 479% | @markdownsouth1500 | $19,000 SnS became roughly $110,000 per year. Kept perpetual sockets, ignored Broadcom. | KVM on Rocky |
| 400% | @WhyMustThisBeSoLong | $10k to over $50k. Already had Windows Datacenter licenses, so went bare metal Hyper-V. | Hyper-V |
| 400% | @noelreynolds2356 | A school. Called it a non-starter and did not renew. | Undecided |
| 317% | @oltep | Customer since 2006. | Unstated |
| 300% | @MarkKnights | Negotiated down, locked three years to buy planning time. | VMware, for now |
| 300% | @TrackyMatt | Triple cost to renew next month, on a three year term. Same licensing, no more product. | Deciding now |
| 200% | @JD-Dallas65 | Refused to pay double. | Hyper-V |
| 15% | @TheCynysterMind | The outlier that matters. Too small to be worth squeezing, so they stayed. Prepared to go 100% Microsoft if that changes. | VMware |
| Workloads | Commenter | Destination |
|---|---|---|
| 20,000 | @mouazaljamil2276 | Nutanix. Single largest move stated in the entire thread. |
| 10,000 | @captchacaptcha | Nutanix for prod, Proxmox for non-prod. One-year mandate. Reusing old servers because new ones are unaffordable. |
| 10,000 → 4,000 | @jamespfearn4326 | GCP Compute Engine plus cloud-native rewrites. Estate shrank 60% in the move. |
| 10,000 | @rijojohn85 | OpenStack, across many clients, by a dedicated migration team, in one year. |
| 4,000 | @prabhakarpatil8085 | Proxmox, in flight. |
| 4,000 vCPU | @RoyOlsen | Proxmox, as contracts end. |
| 3,500 | @stefanh7948 | Proxmox across 14 clusters. Complete. |
| 3,500 | @ericede | Still evaluating. Demoed Morpheus, liked it, cost killed it. Has Hyper-V from acquisitions and won't consider it. |
| 3,000 | @theLaminator88 | Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager, and not happy about it. |
| 2,000 | @kataklysm812 | OpenShift. |
| 1,500 | @FranckEhret | Staying, reluctantly. SAP and Cisco VOIP dependencies; legacy SAN rules out Nutanix. |
| 1,500 | @DS-pk4eh | Hyper-V. |
| 1,500 | @tech-daddy | Oracle VM. |
| 1,400 | @athrvanaik5036 | Bank: Nutanix + OpenShift Virtualization + KVM. |
| 1,000+ | @AlistairMaxwell77 | Hyper-V 2025 clusters, state government. |
| 1,000+ | @kamlshun | Hyper-V, manufacturing, deep in Azure and M365. |
| 1,000 | @VikingDeveloper | Azure Local, cloud-first strategy, now second-guessing it over sovereignty. |
| 800+ | @thomasfuchsberger3912 | Proxmox. A commercial cloud provider, not an SMB. |
| 600-700 | @syllysayanami5032 | Nutanix AHV with Prism Central. Nine clusters collapsed into two clusters of five nodes. |
| 400 | @triradio | Proxmox. Shut down another VMware cluster the day they commented. |
One commenter reports HPE approached them offering free hardware to move off VMware onto Morpheus. An MSP is moving every customer to Morpheus. But Morpheus is the only platform in the set with net negative sentiment: unimpressed after evaluation, monthly cold calls from multiple reps, GreenLake support complaints, and "HPE is the next lock-in."
Free hardware plus bad word of mouth is a story. Nobody has covered it.
Fifteen commenters say they are staying, and almost none say it is because they are trapped. Full VCF stack with vSAN, NSX and Automation has no single-vendor equivalent. SAP and Cisco VOIP certifications. Legacy SAN that rules out Nutanix. A VDI shop on Omnissa. One org whose increase was only 15% because they were too small to bother squeezing.
Your video's framing assumes leaving is the rational default. Two dozen comments disagree with specifics, and one flatly disputes your Nutanix pricing claim with their own numbers.
The single most repeated argument, by a wide margin. Three-year ELAs signed just before the acquisition expire next year. Several add a second trigger: the hardware refresh cycle. One commenter puts full exit at five years and names 2031.
Thirteen comments, and it is no longer abstract. Five separately point out Proxmox is Austrian and therefore European. One org went to Huawei FusionCompute in South Africa. A consultant reports Sangfor, Huawei DCS and H3C driving bank migrations across Asia, LatAm and Africa. One commenter moved to Azure Local under a cloud-first strategy and is now being told to abandon US cloud.
Workstation Pro refugees running Cisco Modeling Labs, Windows 2000 for a customer, retro OSes, air-gapped labs. One moved to six physical PCs and a hardware KVM because nothing else does 3D passthrough. One asks directly: "What's in it for us individual users? We're stuck with Broadcom?"
Six criticisms and they cluster. The SLA and support model disqualifies it at companies with contractual SLOs. Multipath iSCSI needs config-file surgery. Snapshot behaviour on shared storage. Doubts about maintenance burden at scale. Notably, a Proxmox user rebuts each one in the replies, including that LVM-on-iSCSI snapshots landed in version 9.
And in this pull, the argument resolved itself. The person who said snapshots were gone came back, acknowledged version 9 fixed it, and said that having sorted their backups out it's now "more of a goodie than a necessity." Two operators worked it out in your replies without you.
One org consolidated eight or nine VMware clusters into two Nutanix clusters running 600 to 700 VMs, exactly the pitch Nutanix makes. But three separate operators, unprompted, describe the same failure on the other side: mismatched end-of-life dates meant they could not realize ROI on their hardware, one concluding "AHV only, never HCI again." Paired with a hardware compatibility list strict enough to disqualify the older servers everyone is stuck extending, that is the closest thing in this dataset to a documented pattern rather than a one-off complaint.
VMware's increase collided with RAM and storage prices up 5x and cloud spend doubling. One org's AWS bill went £300k to £1.8m; another €35k to €80k per month. Multiple commenters say they cannot buy new servers at all and are refurbishing old ones, which is itself driving platform choice: Nutanix's strict HCL loses to Proxmox on second-hand hardware.
A commenter running 3,500 VMs raised something nobody else did: the market is about to be saturated with VMware certified engineers, because everyone got certified when it was the only platform and now there's nowhere to use it.
Same comment, better detail: one of their global offices emailed asking for support and discovered their licenses had expired the previous year. Nobody had budgeted for it. That is a failure mode nobody is talking about, and at that org's scale it cannot be unique.
Until this pull OpenShift had nine pieces of praise and one criticism, all of it from Red Hat shops saying it was hard but worth it. Now there's an operator saying large VMs with terabyte virtual disks on Pure Storage killed productivity: any latency causes Windows guests to blue screen or orphan inodes. Their verdict was that it isn't built for enterprises.
Every alternative in this dataset now has at least one detailed failure report from somebody running it in production. That is arguably the real finding.
Several comments make the same argument: the blocker is not the product, it is that Windows and VMware admins do not know KVM, and one org's SME advising against migration was the person whose skills were locked to VMware. Meanwhile the VMware certification job market is collapsing and VMUG lab licenses now sit behind an annual VCP-VCF exam.