Live · April 15, 2026 · 1:00 PM ET

The VMware alternative
that keeps Veeam running.

oVirt reached end of life. Veeam shipped the replacement target — supported inside the same hypervisor that replaces VMware. Here is how the pieces fit together, end to end.

60 minutes · four speakers One live demo · Veeam → VergeOS Q&A throughout

Veeam · Strategy

Rick Vanover

Why Veeam built oVirt native support

VergeIO · Field CTO

Paul Hodges

Inside the integration and the live demo

Host · VergeIO

Aaron Richman

Keeping us on time and on point

Resident Analyst

George Crump

The macro picture and what changes now

Before we start

A few housekeeping notes.

We want this to feel like a conversation, not a broadcast. Three things to know.

01

Polls live throughout

Short, anonymous, and used to steer the demo. Your answers shape what we show.

02

Q&A open the whole time

Drop questions in the panel as they come up. We answer live or follow up personally after.

03

Recording goes out same day

Everyone registered gets the replay plus the slides and the lab guide within 24 hours.

Your panel

Four perspectives, one problem.

The VMware-alternative conversation is really two conversations: the hypervisor and the backup. You will hear from both sides.

Host · VergeIO

Aaron Richman

Host · VergeIO

Aaron runs the session — introducing the panel, steering the conversation, opening the floor for questions, and keeping all four of us on time and on point.

Veeam · Product Strategy

Rick Vanover

Senior Director, Product Strategy · Veeam Software

“Customers told us: we are moving off VMware, and we are not moving off Veeam. So we built native support for the platforms replacing it.”

VergeIO · Engineering & Field

Paul Hodges

Field CTO · VergeIO

Paul drives the integration. In the demo, he will move a live Veeam backup into VergeOS and recover a VM while the audience watches the clock.

Resident Analyst

George Crump

Resident Analyst · 25+ years covering storage & data protection

George frames the macro story — why 87% of VMware customers are evaluating alternatives and why the backup question was the hardest one to answer until now.

60 minutes

Here is the route.

Three acts: why this is urgent, how the integration works, and what you do Monday.

0:00

The 87% stall — and why backup was the holdout

The macro forces driving VMware migration and the last objection that blocked it.

George

0:08

What is VergeOS

The VMware alternative that also replaces oVirt — one code base, one operator, existing hardware, existing backup software.

Aaron

0:14

Why Veeam chose oVirt

Why Veeam invested in an oVirt-compatible target and how that unlocks every adjacent hypervisor.

Rick

0:22

What changes when the target speaks oVirt

A concrete before/after on the operator experience, the data path, and the support matrix.

Paul

0:28

Roles — VergeOS and Veeam, split by what each does best

VergeOS handles availability and real-time recovery. Veeam owns retention, single-file, and historical restores.

George

0:34

Live demo — Veeam backup into VergeOS, end to end

All four of us walk the room through it. Backup, recover, file-level restore, fail-over — nothing pre-baked.

All four

0:48

Day 1 and the next 90 days

What to expect when you stand it up, and what lands in Q3 and Q4.

Aaron

0:54

Q&A and close

Answering live, opening the floor, and pointing you at the lab guide.

All

The platform

What is VergeOS.

One operating system for virtualization, storage, and networking. Built to replace VMware — and now, with Veeam integration, to protect like it.

01
VMware alternative
A drop-in replacement for vSphere and vSAN. No ESXi, no vCenter, no stacked licensing tiers.

02

Single code base

Compute, storage, and networking are not bolted together — they are one integrated kernel. One upgrade. One support call.

03

Improves performance

Eliminates the hypervisor/SAN boundary. Data sits next to compute. I/O paths are shorter; workloads feel it.

04

Improves resilience

Built-in replication, snapshots, and recovery. Downtime that used to require a second product is now a platform feature.

05

Licensed per server

Flat, predictable, per-host pricing. No core tax, no socket games, no surprise renewals on CPU upgrades.

06

Uses existing hardware

Runs on the x86 servers you already own. Repurpose the vSphere cluster instead of replacing it.

07
Now uses existing backup software
With Veeam’s oVirt-compatible target, the backup platform you already trust protects VergeOS natively. No new backup vendor to adopt.

→

The upshot

Same servers. Same backup product. Lower licensing. Stronger recovery. That is the swap.

Act One

The market
has already moved.

But most deployments are stuck. The gating factor is not the hypervisor — it is what backs it up.

01

The 87% pattern

Evaluating, committing, deploying — not the same thing.

Industry surveys consistently put VMware-alternative evaluation at roughly 87%. Actual full-migration rates are under 15%. The gap is not technical curiosity — it is vendor inertia in the data-protection stack. Customers will swap a hypervisor. They will not rip out a backup platform in the same quarter.

87%

Evaluating alternatives

Some flavor of active investigation — PoCs, sandbox installs, RFPs.

~15%

Actually migrated

Where evaluation turns into production cutover. The rest stall.

#1

Cited reason: backup continuity

“We cannot change backup products at the same time we change hypervisors.”

Why now

Three forces, converging.

Any one of these would force a conversation. All three at once is what you are living through right now.

01

Broadcom pricing

Per-core licensing, multi-year renewal pressure, reduced discounting. The math on the VMware stack changed overnight and has not moved back.

02

The RAM supercycle

AI demand is consuming the memory and flash supply chain. RAM and SSD pricing is climbing, server OEM lead times are slipping, and refresh budgets are getting squeezed. Getting more out of the hardware you already own is no longer optional.

03

Backup as the blocker

Customers are unwilling to swap backup platforms alongside the hypervisor. Until now, that forced the hypervisor decision to wait.

The pivot

Why Veeam chose oVirt.

“Customers told us: we are moving off VMware, and we are not moving off Veeam. So we built native support for the platforms replacing it.”

— Rick Vanover · Veeam

An oVirt-compatible backup target, shipped in Veeam Data Platform.
Bidirectional: backup and restore, with changed-block tracking and application-aware processing.
First-class for any hypervisor that speaks oVirt — including VergeOS.
Operators keep the Veeam console, the jobs, the policies, the reporting.
Procurement keeps the vendor. Security keeps the attestation. Compliance keeps the audit trail.

The shift

What changes when the target speaks oVirt.

Concrete, before and after. Nothing hand-wavy. This is what operators feel on day one.

Before — the workaround era

Agent-based, fragile, scripted around limitations.

In-guest agents per VM, maintained per OS version.
No changed-block tracking — full-image passes or homegrown scripts.
App-consistent quiesce handled by third-party tooling.
Restore is a rebuild, not a click.
Patch cycles break the backup job, not the hypervisor.
No unified console — one pane for backup, another for the platform.

After — native oVirt target

Backup is a platform feature. Full stop.

No in-guest agents. The hypervisor exposes the backup interface.
Native changed-block tracking with the storage layer that made the snapshot.
App-consistent quiesce is a checkbox, not a script.
Restore happens in the same console, in seconds.
Patch cycles are platform events — backup does not break when hosts update.
One console. Same Veeam UI, same policies, same reporting.

Who owns what

Two products. One recovery strategy.

VergeOS and Veeam are not redundant — they are complementary. The platform handles the minutes-and-seconds work. Veeam handles the weeks-months-years work. That split is intentional, and it is where modern data protection is headed.

VergeOS

Availability & real-time recovery.

Built into the platform. Runs at storage speed. Measured in seconds and minutes, not hours.

Continuous snapshots — application-consistent, storage-level, no external agent, no backup window.
Instant rollback — revert a VM, a dataset, or a whole tenant in the same console, in seconds.
Synchronous & asynchronous replication — local HA and cross-site DR as native platform capabilities.
Ransomware resilience — immutable snapshots the hypervisor itself enforces; recovery is a revert, not a restore.
Zero-trust tenant isolation — blast-radius contained at the platform layer before backup ever enters the picture.

The job: keep running. Recover fast.

Veeam

Retention, single-file & historical recovery.

Lives outside the platform on purpose. Spans time. Spans locations. Spans audit requirements.

Long-term retention — policies measured in months and years, tiered to object storage, tape, or immutable cloud.
Single-file & item-level restore — pull one file, one mailbox, one row back from a point in time. Without rolling the whole VM.
Historical & compliance recovery — recover the system as it existed six months ago for legal, audit, or regulatory response.
Air-gapped & off-platform copies — 3-2-1-1-0. Data protected even if the production platform is compromised end to end.
Portability — restore into VergeOS, or anywhere else Veeam supports. The backup is not trapped inside the hypervisor.

The job: remember. Restore anything, any time.

The integration matters because the lines stay clean. VergeOS is not trying to be your backup product. Veeam is not trying to be your hypervisor. Each does the part it is best at — and because the target speaks oVirt, the handoff between them is native, not bolted on.

Live demo

Veeam into VergeOS, end to end.

All four of us are on camera for this. One of us drives; the others narrate, answer questions, and call out what to watch for. Four steps, one cluster, no safety net.

Step 01

Point Veeam at a VergeOS target.

We register the cluster inside an existing Veeam Data Platform install — same console the team already uses. No new product to learn, no separate UI. We answer audience questions as we go.

Watch for

Registration is done via an easy to implement plug-in.
Existing backup policies apply as-is.
Credentials come from the platform, not an agent.
Capacity inventory populates in under a minute.

Step 02

Run a job. Watch the data path.

We kick off a backup of a live VM. No in-guest agent. No snapshot scripting. Everything flows through the hypervisor’s native backup interface. The group walks through what the console is showing.

Watch for

Changed-block tracking is on by default.
Throughput matches what the underlying storage can deliver.
App-consistent quiesce handled by the platform.
Job report is identical to what the team already reviews.

Step 03

Recover a VM. Time it.

We pick a target VM, choose a restore point, and start recovery — in front of the audience, with a stopwatch. Whoever is driving narrates; the rest of us answer what’s happening and why. The point of this step is honesty about time to recovery.

Watch for

Instant recovery — VM starts from the backup repo.
Storage vMotion happens in the background.
No agent reinstall on the recovered guest.
Total downtime measured in seconds, not hours.

Step 04

File-level restore — from the same console.

We pull a single file out of a backup without rolling the whole VM. Same Veeam console. Same Veeam muscle memory. We trade handoffs so everyone on the panel gets to speak to the parts they own.

Watch for

Browse-level mount of the backup repo.
File restore direct to the running guest.
Audit log written platform-side and Veeam-side.
No break in production traffic.

The recap

Four numbers to leave with.

<1hr

Time to first backup

0

In-guest agents required

Day 1

Full Veeam console parity

Live

Recovery proven in this session

What is next

The next 90 days, and the rest of the year.

Q2 2026 · Today

General availability

Native Veeam target on VergeOS shipping now. Lab guide and sizing calculator available after the session.

Q3 2026

Replication & DR

Veeam-managed replication between VergeOS clusters for DR scenarios. Tenant-level restore workflows.

Q4 2026

Long-term retention tiers

Policy-driven archiving from VergeOS clusters to object storage through the same Veeam console.

After the session

Take the proof home.

Everything on screen is documented and available. The test drive, the paper, the datasheet, and a one-on-one conversation if you want it.

The Ultimate Test Drive

Run VergeOS on your own terms — a guided, no-strings evaluation of the platform.

Enterprise Data Protection for VMware Alternatives

The white paper on Veeam, oVirt, and VergeOS — reference architecture and the full story.

VergeOS + oVirt Data Protection

A one-pager on the integration — what it covers, how it is deployed, and where it fits.

Book 60 minutes with Aaron

Your infrastructure, no slides. We map your environment to the integration and answer anything.

Thanks for being here

The hypervisor conversation is done stalling. Backup is no longer the reason to wait.

Questions live, answers after. Every registrant gets the recording, the lab guide, and direct access to the panel. Thank you for spending an hour with us.

Rick Vanover · Veeam Paul Hodges · VergeIO Aaron Richman · VergeIO · Host George Crump · Resident Analyst