Cube General FAQ
Why should I evaluate VMware alternatives
Broadcom's acquisition of VMware replaced perpetual licenses with subscription bundles. Renewal costs increased three to tenfold, and per-core pricing replaced per-socket billing. These changes give organizations running mission-critical workloads on VMware compelling financial and operational reasons to consider open-source alternatives such as CubeCOS.
How does CubeCOS pricing compare to VMware's per-core subscriptions
CubeCOS has no hypervisor licensing fees, since its open-source core carries no per-core charges. VMware requires a subscription with per-core charges for every bundled component. Teams typically save up to 70% in total cost of ownership over a three- to five-year period after migrating, with the largest savings for high-core-count or hybrid deployments.
What is the migration process from VMware to CubeCOS
Migration follows three phases:
- Assessment: Inventory existing workloads and dependencies.
- Pilot: Deploy CubeCOS in parallel and migrate a subset of workloads to validate the process.
- Cutover: Migrate the remaining workloads in phases, with rollback checkpoints at each stage.
For a mid-sized deployment, this process usually spans several months.
Is Nutanix AHV a good stepping stone before considering CubeCOS
Moving from VMware to Nutanix AHV is a lateral move between two proprietary ecosystems, not a transition to open infrastructure. It doesn't remove the licensing and lock-in concerns that typically motivate a VMware migration in the first place.
Which open-source virtualization platforms are alternatives to VMware
Options include CubeCOS, KVM, Proxmox VE, SUSE Virtualization, and XCP-ng.