VMware and Hyper-V management, and a clear path off VMware

Since Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware in late 2023, VMware has moved to subscription-only licensing with bundled offerings and ended the sale of perpetual licences. For many SMBs, renewal costs and terms changed significantly, and some now pay for features they do not use. That has pushed many to look at a VMware alternative such as Microsoft Hyper-V. Leaving is not automatically the right answer, though. We help you compare your options based on your real needs.

Hyper-V is Microsoft’s hypervisor, the software that runs virtual machines, and it is included with Windows Server. It supports the features most SMBs rely on, including live migration, failover clustering for high availability and replication with Hyper-V Replica. Windows Server Datacenter licensing covers unlimited Windows Server virtual machines on the licensed host. For most small and mid-sized environments, it is a solid choice. Some specialized setups are better served elsewhere, and we tell you if yours is one of them.

Not necessarily. If your licensing is under control, your hardware is current and your team depends on VMware-specific tools, staying can be the right call, at least for now. What matters is running a supported version: vSphere 7 reached end of general support in October 2025, and general support for vSphere 8 is scheduled to end in October 2027. We help you plan around those dates, and we manage VMware properly for as long as you keep it.

Either works, and many businesses use both. Hyper-V on Windows Server keeps your virtual machines on your own hardware, which suits businesses with recent servers or applications that need to stay local. Azure makes sense for workloads that benefit from cloud flexibility, or when your hardware is due for replacement anyway. Azure has Canadian datacenter regions, which helps keep your data in Canada. We recommend the right mix based on your applications and your hardware.

The main factors are the number of hosts and virtual machines, how much data they hold, how complex your applications and their dependencies are, whether your existing hardware can be reused and which Windows Server licences you need. The number of cutover windows, any work outside business hours and whether some workloads move to Azure also play a part. After an inventory and assessment, we give you a clear proposal based on your actual environment.

Each server needs a short planned outage while it is switched over, so we schedule cutovers with you, often outside business hours. Before anything important moves, we run a pilot on a non-critical virtual machine to prove the method. A Veeam backup is taken and verified before each move, and every cutover has a rollback plan. In most cases, your team logs in the next morning to the same applications, now running on Hyper-V.

Yes, because the servers you move usually hold personal information about clients and employees. Law 25 expects that information to stay protected, so we treat the migration as a controlled change: encrypted backups first, restricted access during the project and clear documentation of where data lives afterward. If personal information would be transferred outside Québec, a privacy impact assessment is required first. This approach supports your obligations; it is not legal advice.

Nexxo does, whether you run VMware, Hyper-V or both. Our team monitors your hosts and virtual machines proactively, applies updates, keeps an eye on storage and backup jobs, and handles issues before they affect your staff. When you need help, you contact our dedicated team, and 24/7 support is there for urgent problems such as a host failure. You get one team for the whole platform, not a different contact for each piece.