How OpenMetal Eliminates VMware Licensing Costs

Q: How does OpenMetal eliminate VMware licensing costs for private cloud deployments?

OpenMetal replaces VMware’s per-VM and per-CPU licensing model with an open source stack that carries zero software licensing fees.

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The platform is built on OpenStack for compute orchestration and Ceph for unified storage, both of which are open source projects with no seat-based or feature-gated charges.

With VMware, costs scale directly with virtual machine density: every additional VM, CPU socket, or vSAN node adds to the licensing bill. OpenMetal’s pricing is based entirely on the physical hardware configuration selected, not the number of virtual machines, containers, or workloads running on top of it. Customers pay a flat monthly rate per server and can deploy as many virtual workloads as the hardware supports without incurring additional software costs.

Because OpenMetal runs all OpenStack services in containers deployed via Kolla-Ansible on dedicated bare metal, there is no shared hypervisor layer to license. Organizations migrating from VMware can reallocate what they previously spent on vSphere, vCenter, and vSAN licenses toward additional infrastructure capacity or operational improvements.