SUSE automates VMware migrations
- SUSE announced a partnership with Cloudbase to integrate the Coriolis migration tool into SUSE Virtualization to automate migrations from VMware. - The integration targets the manual migration friction that has kept many customers tied to VMware despite licensing changes. - If Coriolis removes the main migration barrier, practical exits from VMware become more credible, increasing competitive pressure on Broadcom-era licensing models (networkworld.com).
Virtualization software runs one computer as many “virtual” machines, and moving those machines to a new platform usually means copying data, remapping networks, and scheduling downtime. SUSE said on April 21 it is adding Cloudbase’s Coriolis tool to SUSE Virtualization to automate that work for customers leaving VMware and public clouds. (suse.com) SUSE announced the partnership at SUSECON 2026 in Prague, saying Coriolis will let information technology teams migrate virtual machines with “zero service interruptions.” The company said the target is the manual data transfer and outage risk that slow infrastructure changes. (suse.com) Cloudbase describes Coriolis as “cloud migration as a service” software that moves virtual workloads among clouds and virtualization systems at scale. Its public project materials list VMware vSphere, Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud among supported environments. (cloudbase.it) (github.com) SUSE Virtualization is SUSE’s virtualization stack built around Harvester, a Kubernetes-based hyperconverged infrastructure platform that combines virtual machines and containers on the same system. SUSE has been positioning that stack as an open-source alternative for companies reassessing VMware. (suse.com) (techzine.eu) The timing follows Broadcom’s overhaul of VMware’s business after closing its acquisition in November 2023. Broadcom moved VMware toward subscription bundles and ended perpetual-license sales, changes that pushed many customers to review costs and exit options. (broadcom.com) (vmware.com) Network World reported this week that many customers still stayed put because migration work remained too manual and risky even after licensing changes. Computerwoche reported the same friction at SUSECON, where SUSE said manual effort had kept many companies on VMware under Broadcom-era terms. (networkworld.com) (computerwoche.de) SUSE is also aiming this at SAP users, a group that tends to move slowly because business systems cannot tolerate much downtime. The company said the Cloudbase tie-up gives SAP customers a migration path to a SAP-certified hypervisor environment on SUSE Virtualization. (suse.com) Broadcom has argued that its VMware changes simplify the portfolio and focus investment on larger customers using private and hybrid cloud stacks. In a December 2023 statement, VMware by Broadcom said the company had reduced its offerings to “two core offerings,” VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware vSphere Foundation. (vmware.com) SUSE’s bet is that fewer hand-built migration steps will make a VMware exit easier to price, test, and schedule. Whether customers move will depend less on finding an alternative hypervisor than on whether tools like Coriolis can turn a platform switch into an ordinary maintenance job. (suse.com) (networkworld.com)
