Your customers buy from VMware Cloud Director: organisations, self-service, catalogues and an invoice at the end of the month. Replacing vSphere alone does not replace that. Ænix Public Cloud Platform does: multi-tenancy, a branded self-service portal, a service catalogue that goes beyond VMs, and billing through WHMCS or your own system. Your tenants’ VMs move over in cohorts while VMware keeps running.
Not a service provider? If you run VMware for your own organisation rather than selling it, read the VMware alternative for your own estate instead. Planning the move itself? See the VMware migration path and the free VMware Migration Checklist.
Why are providers leaving VMware Cloud Director?
Broadcom moved VMware to subscription-only VCF bundles, ended perpetual licences and changed the terms of the VMware Cloud Service Provider programme. A provider’s costs are tied to a licence model it does not control, and passing that cost on is hard when customers can buy the same capacity elsewhere.
Replacing vSphere is the easy half. Most VMware alternatives answer the hypervisor question: where the VMs run. A provider also has to replace the layer its customers actually use: who is a tenant, what they can order, and how usage becomes an invoice. That layer is what this page covers. For an enterprise leaving vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation for its own use, the VMware alternative page is the better starting point.
What did vCloud Director give you, and what replaces it?
| What VMware Cloud Director gave providers | On Ænix Public Cloud Platform |
|---|---|
| Organisations and org VDCs for each customer | Cozystack tenants with quotas, access rights, network isolation and per-tenant monitoring |
| Reseller and sub-customer structure | Nested tenants: a reseller or customer runs its own sub-tenants |
| Self-service tenant portal | Cozystack Dashboard in your brand: self-registration, team management, support tickets |
| Catalogues and vApp templates | Service catalogue with VMs from custom images and templates, plus managed Kubernetes, databases, S3 and GPU |
| Usage data for VCPP billing | Per-tenant usage to WHMCS, the Ænix billing back-end, or your own billing system |
| Suspending a non-paying customer | Automatic tenant suspension and resource blocking for overdue accounts |
| Edge gateways and NSX networking | Cilium and Kube-OVN networking with per-tenant isolation. Needs redesign, not a one-to-one mapping |
| vSphere and ESXi underneath | KubeVirt virtual machines and containers on one Kubernetes API, LINSTOR/DRBD replicated storage |
Two layers need redesign rather than a literal mapping: the tenant model (Cozystack tenants are Kubernetes-native; vCD organisations are vSphere-native) and networking (Cilium is not NSX). Both are covered in the Platform Readiness Assessment before any tenant moves.
What can you sell that vCloud Director did not?
A VMware Cloud Director catalogue is mostly VMs. On Ænix Public Cloud Platform the same customers can order:
- Virtual machines: Linux and Windows, from your images and templates
- Managed Kubernetes: a cluster per customer, with its own control plane
- Managed databases and queues: PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Valkey, Kafka, ClickHouse, RabbitMQ, NATS, MongoDB, OpenSearch, Qdrant
- S3-compatible object storage for backups and applications
- GPU workloads: whole GPUs passed through to VMs, NVIDIA vGPU for VMs (requires your NVIDIA vGPU licence), or GPUs shared between containers with HAMi. See GPU as a service
Selling managed services on the same hardware is where a provider earns more per customer than by competing on price per vCPU.
How do billing and WHMCS fit?
- WHMCS as the storefront. The Ænix WHMCS integration, a proprietary Ænix module, sells platform services as WHMCS products. Customers order in WHMCS; the platform provisions and reports usage back.
- Ænix portal as the storefront, WHMCS as billing. Customers use the branded portal; WHMCS invoices in the background.
- Your own billing. Providers with an in-house system take per-tenant usage from the platform. A Swiss provider on Cozystack bills dedicated resources hourly from its own system (case study).
- Ænix billing. Public Cloud Platform includes a billing back-end and front-end with payment processing, for providers replacing their billing at the same time.
More on the WHMCS integration →
How do tenant VMs move off vSphere?
Inventory
vSphere and vCD inventory: tenants, VMs, OS mix, networks, storage, integrations.
Platform in parallel
Ænix Public Cloud Platform on new or freed-up hardware, next to VMware.
Tenants and catalogue
Tenant structure, portal branding, service catalogue and billing connection.
Move VMs in cohorts
Konveyor Forklift: cold or warm migration, guest conversion, parallel-run validation with the tenant.
Decommission VMware
Once the last cohort has moved, reuse the hardware as licences lapse.
Plan these cases as rebuilds: Windows VMs using Measured Boot cannot be converted, and Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 do not boot after conversion. The full method is on the VMware migration hub.
If you need one portal over several infrastructures during the move, that has been done: a financial group runs one self-service catalogue over OpenNebula, VMware and Kubernetes (case study).
Where VMware Cloud Director is still ahead
- vSphere operations depth. DRS, Storage DRS and Fault Tolerance have no exact equivalent. KubeVirt live-migrates and schedules VMs well, but it is a different tool.
- The VMware backup ecosystem. Tools built on VMware’s backup APIs are replaced by Velero and per-database point-in-time recovery, and runbooks need rewriting.
- Automated cross-site VM failover. There is none. Stretched multi-site designs exist, as in the Swiss three-data-centre case, but they are designed per project.
- ISV certification. Some software vendors support their products only on ESXi.
If your VMware terms still work for you and customers are not asking for more than VMs, staying may be the right call. We will tell you on the first call.
How long does it take, and what does it cost?
Timeline. A 30-minute discovery call is free. The Platform Readiness Assessment is fixed price and takes 14 or 28 days. At provider scale the productized installer brings the platform live in weeks once hardware is ready. Multi-region operator programmes run a 3–6 month pilot, then 9–18 months to full multi-region. How long it takes to move tenant VMs depends on the estate and is planned in the assessment.
Pricing. Ænix sells a subscription (support, commercial modules and services), not a licence. Public Cloud Platform uses the published support tiers, priced per 10 physical nodes per month. Migration help depends on the tier: documentation on Basic and Standard, guided by Ænix on Plus, managed by Ænix on Enterprise. Out-of-scope work is billed at $150 per hour, and multi-region programmes are quoted per RFP. Details are on the pricing page.
Start with a call
Tell us how many tenants and VMs you run on VMware Cloud Director, what you sell, and when your VMware terms come up for renewal. An Ænix engineer will map your setup to the platform and tell you what moves easily and what needs redesign.
Ænix created Cozystack and maintains it together with maintainers from other companies. Cozystack is a CNCF Sandbox project, Apache 2.0; its CNCF Incubation application is in due diligence. Ænix delivers it as three platforms on one engine (Public Cloud, Private Cloud and AI) that combine rather than exclude each other.