Since the Broadcom acquisition the renewal quote became a strategy meeting. vrtmv reads each VM cold, plans the rebuild on the platform you pick, and signs a parity report proving the new machine matches the old one.
A VMware exit is a sequence you can run and check, not a weekend on a spare box.
vmdk. It never boots the guest and never needs vCenter credentials — it reads the disk offline, works out the OS release, package set, services, and the config and accounts it carries. Your CMDB is usually wrong; this is the inventory that is not.equivalent, partial, or failed. That signed record is the artifact you hand an auditor.The worst version of a VMware exit is the panic move: someone rehosts a few VMs by hand, declares victory, and spends the next quarter finding out what did not come across. Two risks cause most of that.
It is usually two migrations, not one. The obvious one is the virtual machine — disk format, the boot path, removing VMware Tools and making sure virtio drivers are present so the guest boots on KVM. The second one hides inside the guest: a large share of these VMs run CentOS 7, which reached end of life in June 2024, so opening them up to move them means an OS migration too. Do both at once, blind, and you never learn whether the hypervisor move or the distro jump broke it. Decide deliberately — rehost as-is first and modernize the OS as a separate, provable step, or rebuild the OS fresh on the new platform. We wrote up the VMware half and the CentOS 7 half in full.
"It booted" is not "it is the same." The machine that will not start you notice immediately. The dangerous one starts fine and is subtly not the machine it was — a mount that did not come across, a dropped kernel parameter, a service masked on the new box for reasons nobody wrote down. For anything a regulator or auditor will ask about later, "it looks fine" is not an artifact you can hand anyone.
Every migration ends in a parity attestation, and it is the point of the product rather than a footnote. vrtmv verify takes the promise the plan made and the rebuilt target, and checks it literally: are the promised packages installed, did the carried config paths land. It decides only from what is observable on the rebuilt machine — nothing is inferred, a missing package is reported missing, not explained away. The verdict's canonical facts are hashed and Ed25519-signed, and verify exits non-zero on any parity gap, so a pipeline can gate cutover on parity rather than on a green checkmark someone eyeballed. The documentation walks through the whole loop.
You choose the platform to land on — KVM/libvirt, Proxmox VE, or OpenShift Virtualization are the common destinations. vrtmv proves the guest rebuild across Linux distributions. A few attestation-proven conversions relevant to a VMware exit:
Coverage is release-specific and the full record — including every pair we have not proven and why — is on the supported conversions page. Photon OS is VMware's own guest Linux, so a Photon estate is a direct fit.
The economics changed under Broadcom. Perpetual VMware licenses are gone, the products were rebundled, and they are priced per core with a minimum that assumes you're bigger than you are. Renewals have been widely reported to run several times the prior year's — often around three times — which is how a renewal quote stops being a line item and becomes a strategy meeting.
vrtmv is priced the other way — flat, published, with no minimum core count. Your first 10 migrations are free. Past ten, the per-instance rate is $799 a year on demand (On-Demand), $599 bought ten at a time (Pro), and $399 bought a hundred at a time (Fleet). Measured against VMware licensing of roughly $900–1,100 per VM a year — VMware Cloud Foundation's published $350-per-core list rate across a typical host — Fleet at $399 runs about 40% of that, Pro about 60%, and even a single On-Demand instance about 80%; and each instance also buys the migration itself and the signed parity record. The full breakdown is on the pricing page.
Read your VMs cold, plan the rebuild, and get a signed parity report per machine. No vCenter access, nothing booted, no card for the first ten.