In short. For a company with one to three servers, Proxmox VE or Hyper-V costs an order of magnitude less than VMware. On a server with two 32-core Xeons over three years, VMware vSphere Foundation runs about 26,000 to 30,000 USD and VMware Cloud Foundation 67,000 to 77,000 USD, while a Proxmox Premium subscription for two sockets is 6,600 EUR. VMware is licensed per core with a 16-core minimum per processor; Proxmox is licensed per socket with no core limit. VMware earns its price where NSX, vSAN or dozens of nodes are genuinely needed.
Three years ago a small company bought vSphere Essentials for a pair of servers and forgot about licensing for five years. Since VMware moved to per-core subscriptions, the hypervisor bill has become comparable to the price of the server. Here is what VMware costs now, what Proxmox VE and Hyper-V offer, and what that means for a machine with two 32-core Xeons over three years.
What changed at VMware
Subscription instead of perpetual licences. Perpetual keys and the Essentials kits are withdrawn from sale. Everything bought today is a subscription for one, three or five years.
Counted by cores, not sockets. You pay for every physical core, with a minimum of 16 cores charged per processor. A server with two 12-core Xeon Silver chips licenses as 32 cores, not 24. The 72-core minimum order introduced in April 2025 was withdrawn by Broadcom after the market reaction; as of September 2026 the rule is 16 cores per processor.
The range shrank to two bundles. vSphere 9 is sold only inside VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF: vSphere plus vCenter, Aria Operations and a capacity-limited vSAN) or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF: the full stack with vSAN, NSX and automation). Standalone vSphere Standard and Enterprise Plus remain only for version 8, whose support ends on 11 October 2027.
There is no price list. Broadcom does not publish prices; the partner issues the quote. Reference figures from licensing consultants (C4C Group and Gläser IT, July 2026, USD per core per year): vSphere Standard around 50 to 55, VVF around 135 to 155, VCF around 350 to 400. Actual quotes depend on region, volume and term, so treat these as an orientation rather than a budget.
Proxmox VE: the licence is free, you pay for support
Proxmox VE is a Debian-based hypervisor with KVM and LXC containers. Clustering, live migration, HA, SDN, built-in Ceph and ZFS replication all ship in the base product. The code is AGPLv3 with no limits on cores, sockets or machine count. Only the stable repository and support are paid for, per populated socket. Prices from the Proxmox site as of September 2026, EUR per socket per year excluding VAT:
| Tier | Price per socket per year | Support |
|---|---|---|
| Community | 120 EUR | forum only, access to the enterprise repository |
| Basic | 370 EUR | 3 tickets a year, response within one business day |
| Standard | 550 EUR | 10 tickets a year, four-hour response |
| Premium | 1,100 EUR | unlimited tickets, two-hour response |
The feature set is identical at every tier; only support differs, and it operates on weekdays during European business hours.
The third option: Hyper-V and Windows Server Datacenter
The free Hyper-V Server is gone, the last release being 2019. The hypervisor now ships as a Windows Server role and costs what the operating system costs. All physical cores are licensed with a minimum of 16 per server. According to Microsoft as of September 2026, a 16-core pack of Windows Server 2025 Datacenter costs 6,771 USD and Standard 1,176 USD. The licence is perpetual, with CALs on top.
The key point: Datacenter grants unlimited Windows Server guests on the host. If the workloads are a domain controller, an ERP database and SQL Server, Datacenter is bought anyway, Hyper-V comes free with it, and VMware or a Proxmox subscription becomes an additional line in the estimate.
The maths on a server with two 32-core Xeons over three years
A dual-processor server with 64 cores, software only, at the reference figures above, without discounts or CALs.
| Option | Unit of licensing | Over three years | What is included |
|---|---|---|---|
| VMware vSphere Standard 8 | 64 cores | about 9,600 to 10,600 USD | hypervisor, vCenter, HA and vMotion; version 8 only |
| VMware vSphere Foundation | 64 cores | about 26,000 to 30,000 USD | vSphere 9, Aria Operations, capacity-limited vSAN |
| VMware Cloud Foundation | 64 cores | about 67,000 to 77,000 USD | the full stack with vSAN and NSX |
| Proxmox VE Community | 2 sockets | 720 EUR | all features, no support |
| Proxmox VE Standard | 2 sockets | 3,300 EUR | all features, 10 tickets a year |
| Proxmox VE Premium | 2 sockets | 6,600 EUR | all features, unlimited support |
| Windows Server 2025 Datacenter | 4 × 16 cores | 27,084 USD, perpetual | Hyper-V, unlimited Windows Server guests |
The gap between Proxmox and VMware is roughly an order of magnitude, and it widens with core count: Proxmox pricing does not care whether a socket holds 16 cores or 64. Across three such servers the difference between VVF and Proxmox Premium over three years exceeds the price of one server. vSphere Standard is still available, but it is a dead end: there will be no version 9 in it.
Where Proxmox falls short
Support. VMware offers round-the-clock support and joint certified hardware lists with HPE and Dell. Proxmox answers on weekdays during European business hours, and HPE and Dell do not certify it officially: the servers run as ordinary Linux machines, but responsibility for the combination sits with the integrator rather than the manufacturer.
Ecosystem. There is no full DRS equivalent and balancing is basic. There is no distributed switch or NSX-grade micro-segmentation. Backup is covered by Proxmox Backup Server and, since 2024, by Veeam, but integrations with storage arrays at snapshot level and monitoring and DR plugins are noticeably thinner than under vSphere.
People. The market has more administrators with vSphere experience, and Proxmox has no certification comparable to VCP. Without a strong Linux engineer, budget for training or for an outsourced support contract.
The conclusion: companies with one to three servers can cover the job with Proxmox or Hyper-V for a fraction of the VMware cost. VMware earns its price where NSX, vSAN, dozens of nodes or software certified only for vSphere are involved.
Choosing the server for virtualisation
Under VMware a processor should carry no fewer than sixteen cores, otherwise you pay for emptiness, and fewer nodes with denser processors work out cheaper. Under Proxmox and Hyper-V that restriction disappears: two nodes with affordable Xeon Silver chips make a cluster with HA. For Ceph or ZFS take NVMe drives and an HBA in pass-through mode rather than hardware RAID.
Typical platforms from the catalogue:
- HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen11 — 2U, two 4th or 5th generation Xeon Scalable processors up to 64 cores, 32 DDR5 slots, up to 24 NVMe drives. The universal cluster node, from 49,000,000 UZS.
- HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen11 — the same platform in 1U for nodes attached to external storage, from 40,000,000 UZS.
- Dell PowerEdge R760 12LFF — 2U with two Xeon Silver 4410Y processors and 32 GB, 78,000,000 UZS. A clear illustration: 12 cores per processor license as 16 under VMware, while Proxmox simply charges for two sockets.
- Dell PowerEdge R660 10SFF — the 1U counterpart of the R760 for compute nodes.
If a fleet already exists, check whether replacing several old machines with two new ones pays off: the licence saving is calculated in the same table. Ready configurations with prices are in the ProLiant Gen11 and PowerEdge guides, and the price structure is broken down in how much a server costs in Tashkent.
To size a server for the chosen hypervisor and cost the three-year total with licences, write to us. Current platforms are in the Servers section.
Related guides and tools: Virtualisation server, Server configurator, Server processors.
Questions and answers
Can virtual machines be moved from VMware to Proxmox without reinstalling?
Yes. Since version 8.2 Proxmox VE includes an ESXi import wizard that pulls machines straight from the host. Remove VMware Tools before the move and install VirtIO drivers for Windows afterwards. Move one machine per maintenance window, starting with the non-critical ones.
Does Proxmox run on HPE and Dell servers?
It does: it is Debian, and ProLiant and PowerEdge are certified for Linux. ZFS and Ceph need an HBA or RAID in pass-through mode. There is no official Proxmox certification from HPE or Dell, so verify the configuration before buying.
What should companies with perpetual vSphere licences do?
They keep working, but without a subscription there are no updates, and version 8 leaves support in October 2027. Price the subscription for your current core count, compare it with migrating to Proxmox or Hyper-V, and decide a year before support ends rather than in the final month.
