SUSE CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen admitted during SUSECON 2026 that his company initially underestimated the urgent demand for migrations from VMware. The response to Red Hat’s licensing changes in mid-2023 and the development of the Kubernetes platform Rancher took priority. By 2026, however, SUSE is ready to offer a migration path to those leaving VMware, provided they need to modernize beyond legacy systems, according to Van Leeuwen.
SUSE is not the most logical, like-for-like alternative to VMware. Nevertheless, since late 2023, both purported drop-in replacements and less obvious infrastructure players have been eager to attract departing customers. Broadcom’s acquisition and consolidation of VMware have caused the plans of Nutanix, HPE, Scale Computing, Proxmox, hyperscalers, and many other vendors to change significantly.
However, when Van Leeuwen began as SUSE CEO on May 1, 2023, his priority had already been clear. The locking down of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source code in the summer of 2023 led to a sudden threat that all manner of dependent Linux distributions would no longer be able to survive. OpenELA, led by CIQ, SUSE, and Oracle, emerged as an initiative to enable RHEL-compatible Linux distributions. “For me, this was the most natural opportunity for our layered strategy,” said Van Leeuwen.
Underestimation
Nevertheless, the SUSE CEO acknowledges that he underestimated the VMware opportunity. Van Leeuwen saw no need to replace “legacy with legacy,” even though Harvester (now SUSE Virtualization) from the SUSE portfolio was ready to handle virtualization on an open-source basis. The CEO also assessed that the many alternatives to VMware are not so easy to implement. That appears to be the case, with 85 percent of VMware users still intending to phase out their use of the vendor but not yet having left.
“We’ve realized that [a VMware alternative] is a big deal,” says Van Leeuwen. His company is “maybe late, but hopefully not too late” in providing a migration path for VMware. That path may lead to SUSE Virtualization, equipped with an enterprise-grade KVM-based hypervisor. But in collaboration with Cloudbase, SUSE is integrating Coriolis, a tool designed to facilitate migration from multiple IT environments to SUSE Virtualization and beyond.
Read also: SUSE aims to make VMware migrations a “non-event”
The goal: modernization
Van Leeuwen now sees an opportunity for those leaving VMware to modernize their virtualization. “I want to be an innovator. I want to deliver new technology to customers.” The extra dimension that has been added, or at least significantly strengthened, since late 2023 is sovereignty. The desire for a sovereign stack makes migration attractive not only from VMware, but also from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or OCI. At the very least, SUSE is aiming for a straightforward path to digital independence, as we noted before.