The future of your VMs is here
Looking for a VMware alternative? Choose the modern virtualization solution built for cloud-native: Palette Virtual Machine Orchestrator (VMO).
Unify your VMs and containers on one Kubernetes platform for massive cost savings. Get enterprise-grade control, without the legacy lock-in.
Hear from the experts
What are your post-VMware options? How can you make your migration successful? Get all the answers in our latest webinar with SoftwareOne.
Discover Palette VMO: bringing VMs into the cloud native era
A unified platform for both VMs and containers — it’s the modern approach
Why would you escape the cost and lock-in of vSphere, only to tie yourself to another commercial hypervisor platform, or take on the pain of managing separate infrastructure for your VMs and containers?
The smart move: bring your virtual machines to the same Kubernetes-based infrastructure as your containerized workloads. That’s what Palette Virtual Machine Orchestrator (VMO) enables.
You can run virtual machines alongside containers on bare-metal Kubernetes clusters, as first-class citizens. And you can even reuse your existing vSphere hardware.
Whether you plan to stick with VMs long term, refactor to containers over time, or apply VMs for targeted use cases like edge, VMO is the answer.
Open, flexible, versatile. Why settle for less?
Palette VMO is based on a combination of open source CNCF projects, including Kubevirt, CDI, Multus and Descheduler.
This stack allows you to run VMs as Kubernetes pods, with complete mapping between VM and Kubernetes concepts and features.
It gives you full declarative control of Kubernetes on bare metal servers using Cluster API and Canonical’s open source Metal As A Service (MAAS), so you can escape the commercial hypervisor for good.
And you can choose from the widest range of infrastructure software to underpin your VM workloads, from networking to storage.
It works in self-hosted and even air-gapped environments, as well as Spectro Cloud’s SaaS environment.
The result? No lock-in, no limits, no bloat.
A better way to manage your infrastructure
Palette VMO gives you a new home for your VMs — but it also happens to be the leading next-generation Kubernetes management platform.
That means highly automated, scalable deployment of fleets of Kubernetes clusters, across cloud, DC and edge, from a single platform, with a beautiful GUI and powerful API.
It means rich lifecycle management features like observability and upgrades across both VM and container workloads, at any scale.
Migration made as easy as can be
Moving tens of thousands of VMs from one platform to another is always going to be a daunting task. Don’t worry — we’ve got you covered.
Our free VM Migration Assistant, based on the open source Forklift project, lets you convert and migrate your VMs from VMware quickly and safely to their new home.
If that’s not enough, we’ve partnered with some of the world’s leading system integrators, like CDW, SoftwareOne and WWT, who are ready and able to drive your migration from start to finish, for fast, risk-free results.
“When our previous vendor raised prices 4x and left us unsupported, we needed a smarter path. Palette gave us a cost-effective way to manage containers and VMs in one platform, helping us cut overhead, boost uptime, and scale with predictability and ease.”
One global software company chose Palette VMO to rehome nearly 6,000 VM workloads to bare metal Kubernetes in the first wave of a migration away from VMware, working with Spectro Cloud and CDW — with a goal to move 45,000 VMs in total over the next year.
Ready to see for yourself?
See firsthand why organizations are choosing Palette for the best modern
virtualization experience. Book a 1:1 demo with our experts.
The real vSphere alternative
Looking for a VMware alternative? We know you’ve got options. Here’s why Palette VMO stands out.
More modern than Nutanix
We love Nutanix — in fact, Palette can deploy Kubernetes clusters to AHV. But let’s be real. Do you really want to escape from one proprietary hypervisor to a proprietary HCI stack? When you choose legacy, history repeats…
More flexible than OpenShift
If you’re looking at other KubeVirt vendors, of course you’ve encountered Red Hat. But watch out for the Red Flags: lock-in, complexity, and cost. OpenShift is a heavyweight suite with licensing and configuration to match. We hope you like doing things the Red Hat way, instead of your way.
More enterprise grade than DIY KubeVirt
KubeVirt is a fantastic, mature project — but it’s just one part of a much bigger stack that includes storage, networking and more. Are you ready to build, deploy and manage all that yourself, without support?
Frequently asked questions
We believe KubeVirt-based solutions like Palette VMO are a good fit for 90% of VM workloads. But there are specialized workloads like DPDK-based applications and VDI that may not give an optimal experience. Talk to us or your preferred system integrator and we’d be happy to advise.
Palette VMO covers most capabilities of the core vSphere featureset, including vMotion, Storage vMotion, DRS, snapshots, cloning, vSwitch port groups and more. If you have specific dependencies on exotic VMware products and features, come talk to us and we can advise.
We know that the OSS landscape can be overwhelming, especially if you’re used to the traditional software world of legacy tech like VMware. We’ve built Palette to be a mature, enterprise-grade product: that means you get an intuitive user interface, world-class documentation, SLAs, and 24x7 support from experts who know your stack inside-out. We’re also closely allied with vendors like Portworx and Canonical who are building components of the modern virtualization stack, so we can help you navigate the big picture.
If you need additional assistance with a large-scale migration of lots of VM workloads, and advice on designing and building a K8s infrastructure to host them, we work with some of the world’s best system integrators, like WWT and SoftwareOne, who not only know Palette, but can help you with all aspects of your project.
We offer Virtual Machine Orchestrator as a completely free feature for all Palette customers, with all editions of our product. As always, we have simple, fair pricing that scales with the infrastructure you manage through Palette. Unlike some legacy vendors, we don’t believe in using licensing as a weapon.
We believe that VMO wraps a huge amount of value around the open source KubeVirt project, making it easier to use and more powerful. But we understand that some organizations are committed to open source only.
VMs aren’t going away, but Broadcom has shown the world that price hikes are its future. So it’s time to choose your own: bet on cloud native. Spectro Cloud lets you keep what they like about VMs while shedding the cost and lack of portability of VMware.
You’re essentially replacing one proprietary stack with another. By contrast, we’re infrastructure-agnostic and based on open tech, so you won’t be locked into Nutanix hardware or software layers. And while Nutanix started with legacy virtualization in mind, we’ve focused on Kubernetes from the beginning.
Yes. Kubernetes runs some of the world’s most demanding workloads at scale. KubeVirt has been around for years and powers infrastructure for the likes of NVIDIA. Industry analysts have endorsed Kubernetes as a viable migration path for VMware refugees. Plus, Spectro Cloud’s Palette adds the tooling to ensure enterprise-grade stability (monitoring, backups, etc.). In short, the technology is ready, and Spectro Cloud has refined it for enterprise use.