Broadcom closed its acquisition of VMware in 2023 and has been explicit about the plan ever since: concentrate on the roughly 10,000 largest accounts out of a 300,000+ customer base, and treat everyone else as an afterthought. Multi-year contracts have been renewing at several times their old price, smaller resellers got cut out, bundles grew whether you needed them or not, and the roadmap now arrives by press release instead of a plan you can budget against. If that sounds familiar, you're not alone — and odds are you're not one of the 10,000.

None of that makes switching easy, though. Pulling out a hypervisor means re-validating every workload, retraining the team, and trusting a conversion to work the first time — which is exactly why so many admins have stayed put despite the cost. This brief is about closing that gap: a migration path with a risk profile you can actually live with.

Four questions worth answering honestly

Years of running VMware build up quirks nobody remembers anymore — a driver that was never quite right, a network path that only still works because nobody's touched it, a snapshot from years ago nobody got around to deleting. None of that shows up on a spec sheet. It shows up mid-conversion, at the worst possible time, once the hours are already spent.

That's the real weight here: not the work of converting one VM, but not knowing which of the hundred you haven't looked at closely yet is the one that goes wrong — and how much time that costs when it does. Before committing to anything, these are worth sitting with.

First, meet what's on the other side of the bridge. Syneto is a European datacenter technology vendor with almost twenty years of experience building storage, virtualization, and data protection into a single platform: SynetoOS. At its heart is Hyperion, a full hypervisor built on KVM — proven across 19+ years in the Linux kernel and trusted by some of the world's largest clouds.

Migrating doesn't have to mean choosing. SynetoOS installs alongside your existing VMware environment and manages both from one interface, so you move workloads to Hyperion one at a time, on your own schedule — no big-bang switchover, no new hardware. And because Hyperion's concepts map almost one-to-one onto VMware's — a deliberate architectural choice — your team works the new hypervisor with the expertise it already has.

How a single VM actually converts

Conversion always runs on data that's already on a SynetoOS pool, so the VM lands there first — with production untouched. Two features get it there: Protect external VM backs up your VMware VMs to SynetoOS in their native VMDK format, while Import VM pulls a VM across as a series of ever-smaller incremental copies that quickly add up to a complete, current copy — with the original running the whole time.

From there, Convert turns that on-pool VMDK into Hyperion's disk format and registers the VM on KVM. The wizard walks you through the destination host, storage pool, and network mapping, and attaches an SLA policy so the VM is protected the moment it boots — no export files, no manual copying, no extra tools.

The bridge holds because of what's underneath it. SynetoOS is a resilient data-management platform: storage virtualization, SLA-driven data protection, and a full hypervisor under one console — here is how the layers fit together:

At the foundation sits the storage layer: SynetoOS pools the appliance's drives into flexible software-defined pools managed by SyFS, Syneto's own file system, which takes instant snapshots of every running workload. Directly above sits the hypervisor layer: Hyperion itself, on the proven KVM engine from the previous chapter.

Above them sit the daily operations. The orchestration layer covers the full VM lifecycle — creating machines, live-migrating them between hosts with no downtime, and managing those hosts. The protection layer turns those snapshots into business guarantees: you define SLA policies in plain terms — how much data you can afford to lose and how fast you must be back — and SynetoOS keeps the right Recovery Points and ships copies off-site through built-in replication, automatically.

Tying it all together is the management layer: a single web interface for the whole platform and a full REST API for automation and integration — one console, no separate backup product, no extra licenses.

From VMware to Hyperion

SynetoOS also goes where VMware never did: zero-copy clones spin up instant, writable VM copies with near-zero extra space; immutable Recovery Points stay out of reach of ransomware and rogue admins — with Recovery Point holding to pin the ones that matter past retention — and continuous authentication re-verifies identity all session long, not just at login.

And what normally takes three or four separate products — datacenter virtualization, backup and recovery, disaster recovery, and cyber resilience — ships here as one platform: one vendor, one system to secure, one skill set to train, and a major cut in total cost of ownership.

Syneto recommends moving in four phases — from a low-risk pilot to a fully migrated environment — at a pace you set, one VM at a time. Each phase builds confidence before the next, so there's never a leap of faith.

In practice, the early phases are about proving the platform on your own terms — SynetoOS runs beside vSphere while the team gets comfortable, then a handful of real but non-critical workloads validate performance and day-to-day operations. With that confidence earned, the bulk of the environment moves in waves: every ESXi host you empty is a licence you stop renewing and hardware you win back. Only the awkward legacy cases wait until last.

Answering the original questions