Organizations running VMware may face a familiar set of problems. Licensing costs may have climbed along with inflexible renewal terms. The decision to move off legacy hypervisors is easy. The question is how?
SUSE Virtualization 1.8 is built for the moment. This release adds the controls enterprises need to run production workloads with confidence, three supported migration paths to move at your own pace, and a composable platform model that lets you buy only what you need.
Your requested enterprise controls are here
Teams governance as a need and SUSE Virtualization 1.8 closes that gap.
Granular RBAC with specific roles. Admins can now assign fine-grained permissions that are API-enforced within Rancher Manager. This means multi-tenant environments get proper access controls without external tooling or manual workarounds.
Guest cluster backup and restore. Workload protection is now built in at the storage level through the CSI driver. Teams can back up and restore guest Kubernetes clusters (like RKE2 and K3s) running on SUSE Virtualization without bolting on third-party backup products. It’s not a full site-to-site DR solution, but for the majority of workload protection scenarios, it removes a line item from the budget and a dependency from the architecture.
SLE Micro 6.2 immutable OS. The underlying operating system is now immutable by default. Patches apply as transactional updates that can be rolled back. The attack surface shrinks. The patching overhead drops. For security and compliance teams, this is one less conversation during audit season.
VM Status Alerts. Operations teams can now set alerts on individual VM health states, giving them visibility into problems before users start filing tickets. (For more on resilience features including VM Auto Balance and Live Storage Migration, see this deep dive.)
Taken together, these features close the operational gap that kept enterprise teams on proprietary platforms. Governance, workload protection, OS hardening, and proactive alerting are no longer reasons to stay on VMware.
Three Migration Paths, Not One
Enterprises moving thousands of workloads need options that match their risk tolerance, timeline, and team capabilities.
SUSE Virtualization supports three paths.
VM Import Controller is built directly into the platform. Connect to vCenter or ESXi, map networks and storage in the UI, and run cold or warm migrations with Changed Block Tracking. No additional licenses required.
Coriolis by Cloudbase Solutions handles automated, agentless migration from VMware vSphere, AWS, and Azure. Incremental sync keeps source workloads online during the move. New customers get 10 complimentary licenses. Existing customers get 5.
Manual OVF/OVA export is available for teams that want full control over every step of the process. Standard formats. No lock-in to a migration tool either.
The point is choice. FIS-ASP migrated 1,000 SAP systems and avoided VMware renewal cost increases of more than 100%. They started with dev and test environments before moving production workloads. Your teams should be able to choose the path that fits their environment, too.
A Composable Platform. Buy What You Need.
One of the most common objections is lack of choice like forced bundling. You need compute, but the vendor makes you buy storage, security, and management tools whether you want them or not.
SUSE Virtualization is now structured as a composable, tiered platform.
| SUSE Virtualization Compute
VM platform. Bring your existing storage. KVM + KubeVirt + Virtual Clusters + Rancher Manager |
SUSE Virtualization HCI
Converged compute + Longhorn storage. Compute+ SUSE Storage distributed storage |
SUSE Rancher Suite
Complete enterprise platform. HCI + Security + Observability + Application Collection + Private Registry |
Start with Compute if you already have storage you trust. Move to HCI when you want converged infrastructure. Upgrade to SUSE Rancher Suite when you need the full enterprise stack. You are never locked into buying capabilities you do not use.
What Customers Are Seeing
The business case is not hypothetical. Thales Alenia Space cut virtualization costs by 3 and saw 90% faster environment setup for satellite ground systems across 14 sites in 7 countries.
“The cost of SUSE Virtualization is two to three times lower than our previous vendor for equivalent functionality. When we factor in training and operational efficiency, the total cost of ownership clearly favors SUSE.”
Sebastien Blasi, Space Digital Platform Product Line Manager, Thales Alenia Space
Switch operates some of North America’s largest and most advanced data centers. They went from hourly telemetry updates to every 10 seconds and maintains 100% uptime for mission-critical operations.
Get Started
SUSE Virtualization 1.8 is available now. If you are evaluating a move off VMware, start with our Proof of Concept Guide to test SUSE Virtualization in your own environment.
Or visit suse.com/products/rancher/virtualization to learn more and contact your SUSE representative to discuss migration planning for your environment.
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