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Servidores retirados apilados sobre un palé de madera junto a sus guías de rack
8 min read

650 servers became 400: where the savings from leaving VMware actually come from

Topgolf says it avoided or eliminated more than $11.3 million in combined infrastructure costs after moving 12,000 virtual machines off VMware. The headline will end up on a slide this week. What will not is in the same report and in the vendor's own documentation: they went from 650 servers to roughly 400, each venue cluster dropped from six nodes with 35 TB to three with 5 TB, and an entire third-party backup product left the invoice along the way. Inside those $11.3 million there are at least four different bills and only one of them is the hypervisor. We separate the sums, say which part does not transfer to your company, and leave you the list of line items that cost about the same with 40 machines as with 12,000.

Frontal de un rack de servidores con varias generaciones de equipos apiladas, iluminadas por sus propios pilotos
8 min read

Multi-hypervisor is not a phase: it is what you will maintain twice

Sixty percent of the VMware customers surveyed by Unisphere Research are considering a multi-hypervisor strategy, and the four barriers they cite most — operational complexity 40%, multi-vendor management 38%, and tied at 37% securing the increased attack surface and team skills — are precisely what running two platforms at once installs in your shop. The list of what you end up maintaining twice, what genuinely does get halved, and when the dual state is the right call.

Pasillo en penumbra de una sala de servidores, con dos filas de armarios cerrados y sus pilotos encendidos
9 min read

Your VMware provider expires before your contract does

On 8 October 2026 IBM handed "hundreds" of its VMware cloud customers over to another company. None of them signed that deal. The date that governs a hosted VMware cloud is not in your contract: it is in the partner agreement your provider holds with Broadcom. Inside: the January FAQ sentence that describes what just happened nine months in advance, the seven dates with their owner in one table, the two days between 31 March and 2 April 2027, why "VCF 7" does not exist in Broadcom's documentation, and four questions that fit in one email.

Parte trasera de un rack con servidores de 1U, sus puertos de consola a la vista y los mazos de cables recogidos
10 min read

Moving to Proxmox: permissions do not travel, and the role that sounds like "user" opens the console

The migration brings the disks, the configuration and the networks. It brings not one line of the permissions table, and because the two tables look alike in shape, almost nobody rebuilds theirs: they copy it from memory, going by the names of the roles. Inside: the mapping between a vCenter permission and a Proxmox ACL, with its three gaps; the literal definition of the PVEVMUser role —"view, backup, configure CD-ROM, VM console, VM power management"— and why console, CD-ROM and power together do not describe a reader; the question only your installation can answer; the inheritance rule that subtracts instead of adding and bites everyone arriving from Active Directory; the family of privileges that reads and writes files inside the guest, has no mental equivalent in vCenter and is a virtue of the model that nobody uses; root@pam, the unconfined account that cannot be deleted; and the four commands that tell you, the following Monday, who can do what on your cluster.

Armario de red mural de una pequeña empresa con un conmutador y cables sin ordenar
7 min read

Windows Server 2016 ESU is billed from 12 January, whenever you buy it

Windows Server 2016 leaves support on 12 January 2027, 104 days from now. Everyone repeats that; the Azure Arc billing page, less so: licences provisioned after that date are back-billed to 12 January, the charge appears as a separate line item, deactivating and reactivating does not avoid it, deleting and recreating does not either, and Microsoft writes that "there are no conditions under which it can be avoided". Deferring stops being free. And before the price comes eligibility, which is where many smaller companies fall out: on-premises ESU requires Software Assurance or an equivalent Server Subscription, SPLA is not available for 2016, neither is the Visual Studio benefit, and transitioning from Volume Licensing is not supported with Azure Arc. Also: why the bill is decided by how you count cores —16 physical per machine or 8 virtual per VM, with Microsoft's own 1,024-versus-506-core example—, what to ask your CSP now that no list price has been published, and the option that is not on the slide.

Técnico agachado detrás de un rack, con el portátil apoyado en el suelo técnico y un manojo de cables sueltos al lado
10 min read

Moving to Proxmox doesn't touch your licences; failover does

The Windows licensing question comes up in every migration meeting, and the short answer disappoints everyone: changing hypervisor recalculates nothing. Something else changes the bill, and Microsoft has it written in a single sentence: "License Mobility across Server Farms is not available for Windows Server, so each server must be licensed for peak capacity at all times." Each server, peak capacity, at all times. The licence does not follow the virtual machine, so the number depends on how many nodes it could ever start on: 32 core licences or 96, for exactly the same installation. What changed in SQL Server 2022, why the AVMA myth does not apply to you if you are coming from vSphere, and why a Proxmox affinity rule is a useful control but not a contractual boundary.

Armario de servidores con cada máquina etiquetada a mano, una por una
8 min read

Your Proxmox backup skips disks and the job still turns green

The limitations page for the Veeam plug-in for Proxmox VE was updated on 15 September 2026, and two lines in it carry the word that really matters: skipped. There are two very different kinds of "not supported": the one that stops your job and the one that skips a disk and paints the job green. What falls outside the backup of a Proxmox platform, what does not come back when the machine comes back, why LXC containers are a separate inventory, and why the backup manual gets read before you choose your storage rather than on restore day.

Frontal de varios servidores de rack apilados, con sus bandejas de disco etiquetadas y los pilotos de estado encendidos
9 min read

Piloting a VMware alternative is not migrating

Gartner has put a number on leaving VMware, and the number will be misquoted all autumn: by 2029, 55% of enterprises "will initiate proofs of concept" for alternatives, up from 25% in 2026. Initiate pilots, not migrate. Our argument is that most of those pilots will not help anyone decide anything, because they are built to succeed: install it, boot a VM, close the meeting. The six things an honest pilot has to try to break — starting with the restore, not the migration — the variable no analyst can give you (your renewal date), and the cases where we still tell people to stay.

Pasillo de un depósito de archivo con estanterías móviles cerradas y cajas de documentación
8 min read

Project Online shuts down on 30 September: no licence, no export

Microsoft switches Project Online off on 30 September and PWA sites stop being available. But what decides whether you make it in time is not in the announcement: it is in the service description, which requires a live Plan 3 or Plan 5 subscription in the tenant for ANY interaction. Which means the licence you were going to drop to save money during the migration is the one you need in order to export. There is also a second 120-day clock written somewhere else, the PWA is a SharePoint site and not a calendar, and the destination's published limits explicitly exclude your plan.

Parte trasera de una librería de cintas con las unidades LTO y su cableado de fibra
5 min read

Broadcom pulls the VDDK: the first thing that breaks is not your migration, it is your backup

In late August the download pages for the Virtual Disk Development Kit started returning a 404, with no announcement and no deprecation notice. The coverage has read it as "leaving VMware just got harder", and that is half true: it depends where you are going, because Proxmox VE's ESXi importer does not even use it. What almost nobody has looked at is Broadcom's exact wording — "no longer available for use or download" — or the place where that library has been working for twenty years without anyone looking at it: inside your backup.

Armarios de rack vacíos recién instalados en el pasillo de una oficina
9 min read

VMware to Proxmox: the disk arrives intact, Windows will not boot, and the mistake was made two weeks earlier

The Proxmox VE import wizard copies the machine off ESXi without a hitch. Then Windows will not boot, and it is not the wizard's fault: the official documentation says that to boot from VirtIO SCSI, Windows "needs to see a disk requiring the driver before". That before is the problem, because the only place you can do it is the machine you have already shut down. The official way out works, but it is a per-machine, sequential procedure that lives inside the maintenance window. The alternative is not to speed it up: it is to move it to another date.

Cuarto de informática de una empresa pequeña con un bastidor abierto de dos servidores, un SAI abajo, estanterías con discos de repuesto y una mesa plegable con una caja de herramientas
9 min read

VMware brings back vSphere Standard: how to read an announcement that does not exist

On 2 September 2026, two Broadcom executives told the press there will be a new vSphere Standard. No keynote, no press release, no price and no date. The last time the rules changed for this segment—the 72-core minimum of April 2025—that news also arrived through a distributor email, and the reversal through a revised price list. What was actually said, where Broadcom draws the line for "small", and six things you can do before 13 October.

Sala de servidores de empresa de noche, con las luces apagadas, la puerta entreabierta a un pasillo iluminado, un taburete vacío junto al rack y un carro de servicio aparcado en el pasillo
5 min read

Proxmox goes 24/7 on 19 October: what those two hours actually buy you

On 2 September 2026 Proxmox announced that its enterprise support goes 24/7 on 19 October, and opened a North American subsidiary. Until now it ran Monday to Friday, 07:00–17:00 CET/CEST, on Austrian business days. What each plan includes, what it really costs per CPU socket, the three asymmetries sitting inside the announcement itself —response is not resolution, local support stays office hours, and the scope is three products rather than your system— and the six questions for reading any 24/7 support contract, your provider's included.

Armario rack de pared en un cuarto de instalaciones de oficina, con un servidor encendido, polvo en la bandeja, una escalera plegada y un cubo de fregona al lado
7 min read

The Exchange you left running: 21,899 unpatched servers, and yours could be one

On 31 August 2026, Shadowserver scans counted 21,899 IP addresses running an Exchange Server without the CVE-2026-62911 patch released on 11 August. Many of those servers do not belong to companies that never migrated: they are the one left running after the move to Microsoft 365, published on the internet and owned by nobody. What Microsoft's advisory says and does not say next to Germany's BSI, why since April 2022 that server can be switched off, which route Microsoft recommends in 2026 to remove it for good, and the three cases where you should not touch it.

Omnissa Horizon certificado en Proxmox VE: dos puestos de oficina vacíos con los monitores apagados y un cliente ligero detrás de la pantalla
9 min read

Proxmox VE is now Horizon Ready, but in manual mode: you create and power off the desktops yourself

On 4 September 2026 Proxmox announced that Proxmox VE has achieved Omnissa Horizon Ready Hypervisor certification. It is real and it removes a requirement, but it lands in "Manual Provisioning Mode": the program page states that provisioning and power policy are not supported. Meanwhile, Horizon has been integrating over the API with another non-vSphere hypervisor since December. Two different regimes, what Horizon stops doing for you, the RAM and GPU arithmetic nobody runs, and which estates this is a way out for today.

Pasillo de un centro de datos con un rack abierto a medio poblar y un carro elevador con un servidor encima
5 min read

When NOT to migrate from VMware to Proxmox

Migrating from VMware to Proxmox is part of what we do, and there are cases where our answer is: not now. Two classic objections no longer hold — the scheduler's dynamic mode arrived with Proxmox VE 9.2 on 21 May, and Veeam 13.1 has shipped replication since 29 July. The one still standing is different: Proxmox's HA documentation describes nothing equivalent to vSphere's <em>admission control</em>, which flatly refuses to power on the machine that would break your N-1. And the <code>crs</code> factory settings decide more than people think: <code>ha=basic</code> balances by counting machines. The five cases where we tell clients to stay.

Chasis de servidor de rack abierto sobre un banco de taller, con la tapa retirada y dos disipadores de procesador a la vista entre los bancos de memoria
5 min read

Azure stops including the VMware licence: the core count nobody does

Two weeks ago we wrote that 31 October 2026 is the end of Azure VMware Solution with the licence included. Microsoft has since published its portable licensing reference, and that is where the counting rules are: how many cores each node type has, why the distributed firewall counts every host in the private cloud even the ones you are not paying for, and which date actually governs your calendar, because it is not the August 2027 one.

Cajones de un fichero de biblioteca con sus portaetiquetas vacíos: el directorio sigue estando en el sitio de siempre y la fuente de autoridad se está moviendo a la nube

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min read

Entra Connect: the date that stops your sync, and the date that just emails you

On 30 September 2026, any Entra Connect synchronisation running below version 2.5.79.0 stops working. This is not the Cloud Sync migration: it is a separate thing, and it is the only one of the two with a fixed date. The migration runs in waves, allows exceptions and has no announced retirement date. What exactly breaks when sync stops (hint: not email — the offboarding that never reaches the cloud), why auto-upgrade fails to save precisely the servers that need it, and the eight rows in Microsoft's own comparison table that decide whether you can move to Cloud Sync yet.

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