They will pay for your VMware exit. You sign the term: 36 months

Red Hat waives your first year of subscription. Nutanix gives you a discount that grows with deal size. HPE hands over up to twelve months of licences and a one-dollar Zerto. Mirantis pays for the entire migration, architecture workshop included. Four different offers, four different brochures, and one column that says practically the same thing in all four once you go looking for it: the term. Leaving VMware has become a market, and the product on sale there carries a calendar inside it: the months you commit to staying in the new place.

The four offers, read by the column nobody looks at

The latest landed on 27 October 2026: Mirantis announced a VMware exit package with a two-day architecture discovery workshop, plus implementation and migration at no cost for those who qualify. The other three have been on the table for months. Side by side, it reads a lot more clearly:

There is one thing all four share and none of them says in large type, because it does not need to: what gets subsidised is the software line item. The licence. The rest of the project does not appear in the offer because the rest of the project is not theirs.

What none of the four pays for

Red Hat writes it on its own promotion page, and the candour deserves credit: the point of the free year is that you spend more of your budget "on the migration — not running 2 platforms at once". That is honest. But read it the other way round and you see the real invoice: the vendor is telling you, in its own words, that the expensive part is the migration, and the migration is yours. The licence was never where the money went. We broke that down when we looked at where the savings from leaving VMware actually come from, and the order of magnitude has not changed.

That sentence also names, in passing, the most underestimated cost in these projects: the overlap period, the months when both platforms run at once because you have not finished moving everything. None of the four offers covers that money, and it is exactly the same problem as when somebody settles on multi-hypervisor and discovers what you end up maintaining twice: two management planes, two patch cycles, two ways for something to break on a Tuesday.

The discount lasts one cycle; the commitment, three

Nutanix's promotion terms are clear, and worth reading verbatim: "Discount is one-time only and not available at the time of renewal. Renewal pricing will be based on standard software prices without the one-time promotional discount." There is no hidden fine print: they say it on the page. What happens is that almost nobody takes that sentence into the committee.

And there, for us, is the heart of it. What you buy with an exit subsidy is not a price: it is an entry price. The number you take for approval covers years 1 to 3. The number that decides whether this was a good idea is the one for year 4, when the promotion has lapsed, the discount does not carry over, and you have three years of data, automation and trained people sitting on that platform. An attractive entry price followed by a full-rate renewal is, with uncomfortable precision, the same script that made you want to leave where you are.

Put another way, without drama: Red Hat's free year on a three-year commitment is a third off the triennium. That is a real and substantial discount. It deserves to be called that, with its arithmetic visible, rather than "free".

The clock that actually rules: 11 October 2027

None of this would exist without a date. vSphere 8.0 — ESXi 8.x, vCenter Server 8.x and vSAN 8.x — reaches end of general support on 11 October 2027, per Broadcom's own advisory. After that, security patches, bug fixes and hardware compatibility updates stop. That is the date that created this entire market. With one caveat worth checking before you relax: that date belongs to VCF 5.2. If you are on VCF 5.0 or 5.1, your clock stops on 1 June 2027, four and a half months earlier. Plenty of people have the October date written down and will find out theirs was a different one.

Now look at where the offer deadlines fall: Red Hat closes on 31 December 2026, Nutanix on 31 July 2027. Both before end of support, not after. The explanation is simple: they want you decided while you still have runway. A decision made in September 2027 no longer goes to whoever is best, it goes to whoever can deliver fastest, and everyone at that table knows it.

And one piece of arithmetic that appears in no brochure, which is ours: a 36-month commitment signed in November 2026 runs to November 2029. Go to the inventory and check when the hardware you are running comes off the books. If your server refresh falls in 2028 — inside the commitment — you will be choosing machines for a platform you cannot leave until a year after you buy them. That does not invalidate the offer; it changes which servers you buy, and with how much headroom.

What this is NOT

Nobody pays for your migration to Proxmox. That is a data point too

There is no equivalent offer for Proxmox VE, and the reason is arithmetic before it is ideological: there is no licence to discount. What the four offers in the table subsidise is the software line item; in Proxmox that line is a support subscription already costing a fraction, and the rest of the project — inventory, networking, storage, testing, rollback plan — you pay in full.

That cuts both ways, and it deserves saying in full. In favour: you sign nothing. No minimum term, no year 4 at list price, no "new customer" requirement and no eligibility criteria you cannot read. Against: nobody funds your overlap. That money comes out of your budget, this year, and you feel it.

Five questions before you sign

None of them is technical. All five are asked by email, answered in writing, and fit in a half-hour meeting:

The term, not the discount

None of the four offers is bad. What goes wrong is reading the discount column and skipping the term column, because the first lasts one cycle and the second lasts three years. 11 October 2027 is on everyone's calendar and it does not move. So the useful question is not where do I go: it is how long am I committing to stay there, and whether that term is chosen by me or chosen by the date.

We do VMware to Proxmox migration and we have been running Proxmox VE with Ceph in production since long before this was a market. If what you need is not a vendor but an honest number — what the project really costs, how many months the overlap lasts and what happens in year 4 of each option — that is consulting, and it sometimes ends in "stay where you are and renew". drop us a line and we will look at it with your figures in front of us.

Sources (checked on 31 October 2026): the first year at no cost on qualifying 3-year agreements, the migration assessment credit, the 31-12-2026 deadline and the line about not running two platforms at once come from the official Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization promotion page. Nutanix's terms — 36-month minimum, new customers only, registered and transacted before 31-07-2027, one-time discount not available at renewal — are from the Nutanix Migration Promotion page. HPE's offer — up to a year of VM Essentials, Zerto Advanced Resilience Edition at $1 for 12 months covering 25 concurrent VMs with no cap on total VMs migrated, 0% financing through HPE Financial Services, and three years of licences for partners achieving the Private Cloud with Virtualization competency — announced in June 2026, is in the official HPE Morpheus Software Onboarding Promotion document and covered by Techzine. The Mirantis announcement of 27-10-2026, with the two-day architecture workshop and no-cost migration and implementation for eligible customers, is in its press release; that it does not publish eligibility criteria is noted by Futurum Group. End of general support for vSphere 8.0 — ESXi 8.x, vCenter Server 8.x and vSAN 8.x — on 11-10-2027 is from Broadcom's advisory "End of General Support for vSphere 8.0". That this date belongs to VCF 5.2, and that VCF 5.0 and 5.1 end earlier, on 1 June 2027, is from endoflife.date. The 16-core-per-processor minimum is verbatim from Broadcom's documentation: "You must license a minimum of 16 physical cores for each CPU (physical processor) in your ESXi hosts, even if a CPU has fewer than 16 cores" — KB 313548. What is ours — and it is worth separating — is the reading of the four offers laid side by side through the term column, the November 2026 to November 2029 arithmetic against the hardware refresh cycle, the observation that both published deadlines fall before end of support and that the VCF 5.0 and 5.1 clock stops four and a half months earlier, and the five questions. The warning that a free year is a cash-flow concession rather than a TCO saving is not ours: it has been circulating since June 2026 in dual-platform cost analyses. Cover photo: Datacenter Server Racks, by Carl Lender, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.