Virtualization teams often look at Proxmox after VMware, but its modular mix of KVM, Linux networking, ZFS/Ceph, and separate backup adds long-term operational complexity. As clusters grow, keeping all those subsystems aligned for mobility, availability, and recovery becomes the operator’s burden. VergeOS instead integrates hypervisor, storage, networking, protection, and private AI into a single Infrastructure Operating System and unified codebase. The article concludes that the real VMware successor decision is about architecture, not just swapping hypervisors.