Platform9 takes on the risk of leaving VMware, so you don't have to. Platform9 is taking on the risk that has kept VMware migrations stuck: the uncertainty of how long they take. Under the 60-Day Production Guarantee, customers define a production milestone, reach it within 60 days, or cancel at no cost. Over the past year, Platform9 has become an established alternative for organizations seeking a more flexible path off VMware. It's been an exciting period of growth for its company, marked by a constant and increasingly rapid loop of customer and partner feedback and product iteration cycles. Platform9 has recently realized some noteworthy milestones, including: * An enterprise customer is now running (well) over 40,000 production VMs on Platform9 * Customer count grew 67% over the past fiscal year * Active presence in nearly 50 countries worldwide and 38% quarterly increase in new partners over the past year The private cloud market is going through a period of rapid transformation. Factors as diverse as private AI's emergence - and the GPU utilization, cost predictability and data control requirements that drive it, evolving data sovereignty and compliance mandates and general public cloud fatigue (read: skyrocketing costs) have driven a renewed demand for flexible private cloud management. Arguably no factor has been a bigger driver for this market, though, than the changes that Broadcom has introduced to historically stable VMware contracts. Its founders long admired the VMware model, and it inspired the way Platform9 was originally developed. With a new owner in place, that model has become untenable and has driven a disruption not seen in this market for well over a decade. Platform9 is pleased that a growing number of organizations are recognizing Platform9 as a reliable alternative for powering their virtualized workloads. And today, Platform9 is pleased to introduce the 60-Day Production Guarantee. What is the 60-Day Production Guarantee? Moving off VMware is one thing. Knowing how long it will take is another. For organizations with hundreds or thousands of VMs, migration can feel like a project with no clear finish line. How long will it take? How much engineering time will it require? What happens if the migration takes longer than expected? Organizations might just sign up for another two years with VMware, even if they don't know where that will lead or how much it might cost them in the end. It shouldn't be that way for your businesses. This is why Platform9 is launching the new 60-Day Production Guarantee designed to remove some of that uncertainty. Customers have 60 days to reach their first agreed-upon production milestone with Platform9 experts providing support every step of the way. If companies are not able to reach this milestone, they can de-book with no penalty. This is complimentary to its vJailbreak, a free utility built for the automated transition of workloads from VMware to Platform9. Move first. Then modernize. A VMware migration is a chance to reconsider some of the assumptions that have shaped private infrastructure for years: * Do Platform9 still want infrastructure that requires significant operational complexity? * Should private cloud continue to be primarily VM-centric? * Can organizations get a cloud-like operating experience on infrastructure they control? * How can existing infrastructure investments support new workloads such as Kubernetes and AI? * Can infrastructure teams modernize without replacing everything they already own? A VMware exit doesn't have to mean recreating yesterday's private cloud on a different platform. It can be the first step toward building the private cloud organizations actually need for tomorrow. AI is changing what Private Cloud needs to do. There is another reason this matters now. AI is changing the infrastructure equation. Organizations are adding GPUs, increasing compute requirements and adopting Kubernetes-based environments to support new applications. At the same time, infrastructure costs are becoming harder to predict, particularly as demand for compute, memory and high-performance hardware increases. That puts a premium on infrastructure efficiency. The more expensive infrastructure becomes, the less room there is for idle capacity, unnecessary management overhead or infrastructure that can only support one class of workload. Private clouds can provide a way to regain some of that control. For workloads where cost, performance, data sovereignty, security and predictability matter, running infrastructure under your own control can make strategic sense. But that private cloud needs to support more than the virtual machines that drove the original investment. The next private cloud needs to be able to run what comes next. The future is now and Platform9 is ready for it. Get off VMware and start modernizing. Platform9 is incredibly excited with this new offering. Platform9 want to give you the predictability with pricing and performance that you likely experienced with early days VMware. This is a low risk, high reward proposal where Platform9 set milestones together. Want to do more testing of its Private Cloud? Its free 0-60 Hands-on Lab is a live, instructor-led session where you'll tour the product, deploy VMs, work through multi-tenancy, and see a workload migration with vJailbreak - all in an environment Platform9 provide. * Dave Gilinsky Dave Gilinsky runs global support and professional services at Platform9. His teams handle the part of a VMware migration that comes after the planning: the cutovers, the rollbacks, and the environments that don't match the diagram. Before Platform9, he built support and services organizations at Pure Storage, WEKA, Tintri, and Dell EMC. View all posts

Platform9 has launched the Cloud Solution Provider Program to help cloud service providers transition from VMware before the VMware Cloud Service Provider programme ends in March 2027. The initiative offers predictable per-region pricing and 90-day unlimited-core pricing to help providers absorb migration costs. The programme includes vJailbreak, an automated migration tool that connects to VMware vCenter environments to discover and migrate workloads. One early adopter is currently migrating 40,000 virtual machines, achieving several hundred migrations daily. Platform9's Private Cloud Director delivers built-in multi-tenancy, allowing providers to operate customer environments on existing hardware without replatforming costs. The solution includes VM High Availability, live migration and native GPU and Kubernetes support for modern container services alongside virtualised workloads.

VMware takes first step toward Arm with ESX preview. VMware has released a first public preview of ESX for Arm systems. With this move, the virtualization company is explicitly exploring a future in which Arm processors play a greater role in data centers and edge environments. The preview appeared without a major announcement, reports The Register, but documentation shows that VMware now has a working version of its hypervisor running on Arm-based servers. Supported systems include those from HPE and Gigabyte with Ampere processors and a Supermicro server with an Nvidia Grace chip. For now, this is still a limited test version. Several well-known VMware components are still missing, including vSAN for hyper-converged storage and NSX for network virtualization. VMware also advises users to manage Arm environments separately from existing x86 infrastructure. An Arm cluster must therefore be managed from a separate vCenter installation on x86 hardware. At the same time, however, VMware is expanding support in its desktop software. New versions of Workstation and Fusion can connect to external Arm-based ESXi systems. This makes it possible to access virtual machines on Arm servers directly from existing management environments. Growing interest in Arm. With this move, VMware is responding to a trend that has been visible in the infrastructure market for some time. Arm processors are gaining ground because they are generally more energy-efficient than traditional x86 CPUs. As a result, interest in Arm-based servers is growing, particularly for AI workloads and edge deployments. In addition, hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google are increasingly promoting their own Arm processors as an alternative to traditional server architectures. These chips are designed to offer a better balance between performance and energy consumption. VMware previously stated that customers are primarily experimenting with Arm platforms but remain cautious about large-scale migrations of existing workloads for now. A date for the final release of ESX on Arm has therefore not yet been announced. Competitors seek an opening. At the same time, pressure on VMware has continued to mount since its acquisition by Broadcom. Several competitors are trying to lure away customers who are struggling with VMware's revised licensing model. For example, Platform9 recently unveiled its own appliance-like private cloud solution designed to be easier to deploy. Australian company Netframe is also targeting smaller VMware environments with a free edition supporting up to three hosts.