SUSE is targeting enterprises weighing their VMware options with a new partnership that promises zero-downtime, automated migrations at scale.

The open-source infrastructure company has announced a partnership with Cloudbase Solutions to integrate the Coriolis migration tool into its SUSE Virtualization stack. The aim is to remove the manual effort that has kept many enterprises on VMware despite Broadcom’s licensing changes.

“In the post-VMware world, we see ourselves as a modern infrastructure layer for virtualization,” said Peter Smails, GM of Cloud Native at SUSE, speaking at SUSEcon 2026 in Prague, Czech Republic. “The core challenge is getting there.”

The bottleneck: People, not technology

Since Broadcom acquired VMware and restructured its licensing, many enterprises that wanted to move to another product haven’t had the resources to manually migrate thousands of virtual machines (VMs). The Coriolis integration addresses three pain points: labor, downtime risk, and dual licensing costs during migration.

But some analysts caution that tooling alone won’t solve the problem, and the mass exodus many predicted hasn’t materialized.

“Migrations are a people-process-technology trifecta,” said Ashish Nadkarni, group vice president at IDC. “Automated migration tooling addresses technology and, possibly, part of the process. Ultimately, the success depends on diligence and attention to detail.”

More deliberate timelines

Nadkarni said the situation has stabilized more than headlines suggest. “Things seemed to have settled down,” he argued. “Broadcom has been signaling changes and renegotiation tactics. No one was shocked.”

In fact, many VMware customers are absorbing costs or renegotiating, not switching. “Why fix what isn’t broken? Given the stickiness of VMware, it’s the cost of doing business,” Nadkarni said. “People don’t mass-migrate just because prices went up. Prices go up for all subscriptions.”

And the migrations that do happen won’t be quick. “It took these companies upwards of 15 years to get where they got with VMware,” Nadkarni pointed out.

Smails offered a blunter assessment of how customers initially reacted to VMware’s acquisition by Broadcom. “Everybody freaked out. They panicked,” he said. “And virtually everyone renewed. That was the Broadcom play all along.”

Now, customers are returning with more deliberate timelines. “A customer I met with this morning said, ‘We have one year. Now they’re charging us for stuff we don’t need,’” Smails said. “Broadcom is turning every screw.”

But Smails also emphasized that SUSE isn’t pushing a rip-and-replace approach. “It could include a bridge,” he said.

Migrations bundled into licenses

The Coriolis tool supports VMware-to-SUSE migrations, cloud repatriation to on-premises infrastructure, and a verified migration path for SAP HANA workloads.

Smails said the migration is “agentless” and supports live migration, so there is no downtime during the transition. SUSE is also bundling migrations into the cost of virtualization licenses. “Each license includes 10 migrations,” said Smails. “It’s baked into the price.”

Competitive positioning

Nadkarni positioned SUSE as “an open-source alternative to Nutanix, which is proprietary,” and pointed out, “Red Hat’s virtualization is a retrofit for containers, not designed for virtualization.”

On the other hand, Smails noted, SUSE isn’t trying to be a like-for-like replacement for VMware. “If you’re on a modernization journey toward cloud native, and 90% of companies are, we’re your vendor,” he said. “It’s about creating a unified home for managing containers and VM applications.”

One customer’s head start

The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) is further along in its migration off VMware than most. The organization began evaluating alternatives in 2021, before the Broadcom acquisition, and now runs 60 Kubernetes clusters and 400 VMs on SUSE infrastructure.

“When we saw the licensing change, we thought, ‘Oh, we’re so lucky,'” said Dino Conciatore, systems engineer at CSCS. “We never liked closed products.”

CSCS, part of Switzerland’s ETH domain of research organizations, receives government funding and must spend it wisely. “We could spend more money on VMware or on developing new technology,” Conciatore said. The organization chose the latter.

CSCS Associate Director Dr. Maria Grazia Giuffreda told the SUSEcon audience that the shift has freed up engineering capacity. “Because of SUSE Virtualization, we reduced the amount of time managing infrastructure by 70%,” she said. “You are freeing the time of very excellent engineers to take on new challenges rather than routine and boring work.”

Conciatore noted, however, that CSCS didn’t abandon VMware. “We’re not leaving completely,” he said. “The main thing is, we didn’t expand VMware in the last few years, and started buying alternatives.”

The bigger picture

For enterprises still weighing their options, the decision may come down to how deeply they are embedded in the VMware network, Nadkarni said. “It’s not just VMware, but the whole ecosystem of tools tied into the VMware way of doing things. That’s what Broadcom is exploiting.”

CSCS had an advantage, Conciatore said: Its automation treated physical and virtual machines the same way, making it easier to decouple. Not every enterprise will have that flexibility.

“SUSE is pushing this as a VMware alternative because they have something that works,” he said. “Currently, the fact that we are not vendor-locked is very important.”