Open Source For You reported in August 2026 that Centorrino Technologies (CT) has picked SUSE Virtualisation to replace VMware on its hosted infrastructure platform. CT is an Australian managed services and hosting provider, and thousands of virtual machines will move to the new platform.
What is happening
According to the report, CT is migrating mainly to cut licensing and subscription costs and keep the platform affordable over the long term. SUSE Virtualisation was already running in production at CT and was ready to roll out to customers. CT built a repeatable migration framework for hundreds of customer environments. It covers moving production workloads with minimal downtime, multi-tenant hosting, and enterprise-grade availability.
CT CTO Nicholas Iacobucci said rising licensing costs from major vendors are creating both pressure and an opportunity for change. He said SUSE Virtualisation gives customers long-term commercial certainty and control over their infrastructure and costs. SUSE’s Ben Henshall, general manager for Australia and New Zealand, said organisations “are actively looking for alternatives”. CT plans to expand its use of SUSE and help other Australian organisations move off proprietary virtualisation.
Context
This is one of many VMware exits since Broadcom bought VMware and moved it to subscription-only licensing. Hosting providers feel the change first, because they pay for every core they run. SUSE Virtualisation is SUSE’s product built on Harvester, the open source HCI platform. It runs KVM virtual machines through KubeVirt on Kubernetes, with Longhorn for storage. So VMs and containers end up on the same open source stack.
What sysadmins should take from it
- Migration tooling is the hard part. CT’s point about a “repeatable migration framework” matters. Converting disks, rebuilding networks, swapping VMware Tools for virtio drivers and guest agents, and testing each workload take longer than installing the new hypervisor.
- Plan for skills, not just licences. A Kubernetes-based virtualisation layer needs people comfortable with both KVM and Kubernetes.
- Test the boring parts. Before you move anything critical, check backup integration, monitoring, live migration and storage performance.
If you are weighing your own options, our post on exporting VMs from the XenServer command line covers the first step of any hypervisor move: getting disk images out of the old platform.
Source
Original article: https://www.opensourceforu.com/2026/08/thousands-of-vmware-vms-move-to-open-source-suse-virtualisation/ (Open Source For You). Found via the Linux News app.
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