VMware to Microsoft, Ep. 2: Why Would I Leave?
A companion to the VMware to Microsoft podcast: Ernie Costa on Broadcom's price hikes, why Hyper-V is the real successor, and whether the ecosystem holds up at enterprise scale.
Why would I leave VMware, the gold standard, for a second-rate platform like Hyper-V? That’s the question I put to Ernie Costa, Microsoft MVP and manager of the cloud operations team at Commvault, in episode 2 of VMware to Microsoft. It’s tongue-in-cheek, but it’s also the real objection I hear from IT leaders every time this topic comes up.
Ernie runs internal IT at Commvault, a backup software company that touches Hyper-V, VMware, Nutanix, and Proxmox at scale. He’s not a VMware hater. He called it, flatly, the most complete VM hosting package on the market: deep APIs, mature automation, a genuinely excellent single-pane-of-glass management experience, rich billback and metrics data. If you need all of that, VMware still delivers.
The question is whether you need all of that.
What’s happening with pricing
Ernie’s take on the Broadcom situation: basic corporate greed, maximizing revenue in a short window without much regard for the long-term relationship. He’s seen price increases in the 10x to 30x range firsthand, in actual paperwork he’s reviewed. Some larger Fortune 100 and 500 accounts negotiated lower pricing for year one, only to be told to expect 3x to 10x increases in years two and three. About 75% of enterprises run VMware at some level, so this isn’t a niche problem.
Broadcom also has a track record with prior acquisitions of cutting quality after the deal closes. VMware has already laid off tens of thousands of people across development, support, sales engineering, and licensing. Ernie’s read: it will not take ten years to look back on this as a cautionary tale.
None of that means moving off VMware is simple. Ernie compared it to switching power companies: not a two-week project, real planning required.
Why Hyper-V specifically
Ernie’s case isn’t anything-but-VMware. It’s Hyper-V, by name, as the strongest replacement. His reasoning is straightforward: Azure runs on Hyper-V. Not a marketing analogy, the actual hypervisor. Across roughly 300 physical data center buildings worldwide, including highly secured US government regions and China, Azure runs on the same hypervisor that ships in Windows Server, Azure Stack HCI, and even Windows 11’s VBS security features. Xbox runs on it too.
That scale matters because every bug found anywhere in that footprint gets fixed and flows both upstream and downstream. Ernie called it public QA at a scale most vendors can’t match.
The ecosystem holds up
The backup, security, and management objection is fair, so I pushed on it. Commvault backs up every current Windows Server version including Azure Stack HCI 22H2 and 23H2, and Ernie has personally tested backing up AKS hybrid clusters on Azure Stack HCI. Veeam, Cohesity, and Rubrik all support Hyper-V hosting too.
On security: Windows Defender ships free with Windows Server, and Ernie confirmed Carbon Black and CrowdStrike both run cleanly on it. Commvault has run thousands of VMs on Hyper-V and Azure Stack HCI internally for roughly five years with both.
For lifecycle management, you’ve got PowerShell, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (still actively developed), and Windows Admin Center, which Ernie says has matured a lot even if it’s not his favorite tool. Azure Stack HCI adds a direct line into the Azure portal through the Resource Bridge, plus Bicep and ARM template support.
Windows Server is catching up fast
One myth Ernie wanted to kill outright: the idea that Microsoft is abandoning Hyper-V in favor of a subscription-only Azure Stack HCI path. Innovations built for Azure Stack HCI are flowing back into plain Windows Server. Windows Server 2025, in preview when we recorded, inherits a rewritten deduplication engine for ReFS with meaningfully better performance for active workloads like VDI and SQL Server. Microsoft also demoed roughly 70% faster NVMe read and write throughput from storage stack changes, and Ernie confirmed the gain himself on a preview build.
This matters for hosters specifically. Hosting providers are not licensed to run customer workloads on Azure Stack HCI. Windows Server getting these improvements natively is the only path for them.
Where this leaves you
Ernie’s closing advice was to look at what you run, not what VMware can theoretically do. If most of your workload is straightforward VMs, Hyper-V checks the box. Storage Spaces Direct, in his words, is the most performant and stable hyperconverged storage option out there, and he’ll argue that point with anyone. Kubernetes hosting through AKS hybrid works at scale. Azure Virtual Desktop on Azure Stack HCI works at scale too. Commvault runs all of it internally today.
Is the management experience as feature-rich as vCenter? No. Does it accomplish what most organizations need? Ernie’s answer was yes, most of the time. Weigh VMware’s premium bill against what your actual workloads require, not against the fullest version of VMware’s feature list.
This post is part of the VMware to Microsoft podcast series.
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