Many Swedish organizations have built their infrastructure on a virtualization platform over a long period. When the licensing model changes, it is not enough to simply compare price tags — the decision is about where the expertise lies, how much work a migration entails, and what you want to own yourselves in five years.
Why it is rarely a pure price war
The first response is usually to look for a cheaper hypervisor. But the license is only one part of the cost. The surrounding tools — backup, monitoring, automation — are built for a specific platform, and the staff are experts in that platform.
A migration that looks like it saves money on the license line can end up costing more in consulting hours, rewritten routines, and lost speed during the transition. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t move. It means the calculation needs to include more than the license.
The four options
Stay and renegotiate. Reasonable if you’re large enough to have negotiating leverage and the platform otherwise works well. It buys you time rather than solving the problem.
Switch hypervisor. Lowers license costs but requires the toolchain and expertise to follow along, whether you run on-premise or in your own data center. Plan for a project, not an upgrade.
Move the workload to operations as a service. You stop managing the hypervisor altogether and instead buy capacity in cloud operations. The licensing model becomes the provider’s responsibility.
Split it up. Keep what’s hard to move, move what’s easy — in practice, a hybrid cloud. Reduces exposure without doing everything at once.
What usually decides
How many virtual machines do you have, and how many of them actually do anything? Most environments contain a significant share of machines that no one uses anymore, but that no one has dared to shut down. Cleaning up first can change the numbers on its own.
What do the dependencies look like? An application that requires a certain hypervisor or specific hardware integration drives the choice more than price does.
Clean up before you do the math
Before you compare options, it’s worth reviewing what is actually running. In most environments, there are virtual machines that no one uses anymore, test environments that were left behind, and duplicates from a migration that was never cleaned up.
Shutting down what isn’t being used can significantly reduce licensing needs, and also makes every option cheaper to calculate. It’s the cheapest first step there is.
What we offer instead
With our IaaS platform, you purchase capacity in our own data centers in Sweden and no longer have to manage the virtualization layer yourselves. The licensing responsibility becomes ours, not yours.
Before anything is migrated, our consultants review the environment: what’s running, what’s actually being used, and which dependencies determine the order of migration. That groundwork is valuable no matter which of the four options you end up choosing.
Frequently asked questions about costly virtualization
Is it possible to migrate virtual machines without rebuilding them?
Often yes, but not always. Older operating systems and hardware-dependent applications require more work. This is determined during the review.
What happens to our backup if we switch platforms?
Backup solutions are often platform-dependent. That’s one of the costs that is often missed in the initial cost estimate.
How long does a migration take?
It depends on the number of machines and dependencies. Plan for months for a typical-sized environment, and do it in stages.
Calculate the total cost, not just the licence.
We review your virtualisation environment and show what the four paths actually mean for you.