60% of Organizations Are Considering a Multi-Hypervisor Strategy Amid VMware Uncertainty

Organizations are increasingly reconsidering their reliance on a single virtualization vendor following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. According to a Rimini survey, 60% of respondents are considering a multi-hypervisor strategy for their on-premises environments.

Businesses Seek More Flexible Virtualization Strategies

“Many clients see this as a wake-up call about how reliant businesses have become on a single vendor and how they want more diversity in their on-premises environments,” Gartner Senior Director Analyst Tony Harvey previously told Ars, referring to the Broadcom acquisition.

Rimini said the survey results indicate growing interest in flexible, mixed environments that support both operational and financial goals.

Nearly half of respondents—47%—favor hybrid IT virtualization environments that combine hypervisors and containers. The approach is intended to provide the “best of both worlds” by allowing organizations to choose the most appropriate placement for different workloads.

Many VMware Users Are Not Planning to Move to Cloud Foundation

Rimini also reported that 48% of respondents have no plans to migrate their assets to VMware’s hybrid cloud platform, Cloud Foundation.

“This trend signals an increasing diversification of enterprise virtualization strategies, with a long-term shift toward tailored, multiplatform IT virtualization environments,” the announcement states. “As organizations reevaluate their modernization paths, they are increasingly adopting approaches that combine on-premises infrastructure, private clouds, public clouds, and alternative hypervisors to support increased workload flexibility, operational efficiency, and cost control.”

Gartner Predicts More Enterprises Will Investigate VMware Alternatives

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure, released last month, predicts that 55% of enterprises will have a proof of concept for an alternative distributed hybrid infrastructure product by 2029. These organizations would use the technology to replace VMware-based deployments and adopt hybrid cloud infrastructure delivery, up from 25% in 2026.

Read more about Gartner’s prediction for VMware alternatives.

Enterprises Look Beyond Simple Vendor Replacement

Joe McKendrick, Principal Analyst at Unisphere Research, said VMware users are interested in more than simply replacing one virtualization vendor with another.

“This reflects a broader effort by enterprises to reduce dependence on a single provider, maintain continuity of mission-critical systems, and modernize them at a pace that aligns with their business requirements,” McKendrick said. “For many organizations, this means balancing support for existing environments with new investments designed to improve resiliency, security, and scalability over time.”