Sources, scope and the full tables behind Learn the migration, not the platform. Everything here can be checked independently of me.
Contract data. The AusTender OCDS API, the Commonwealth’s contract notice register, read 2 November 2026. Scope: contract notices with end dates between 1 January 2027 and 31 December 2028 where the supplier is VMware Australia Pty Ltd or VMware International Unlimited Company — 19 notices, A$485.3 million published value, 11 agencies. A third entity, VMWARE USER GROUP INC, appears in the register and is excluded: it is a user group, not the vendor.
What this excludes. Commonwealth contracts only — no state or territory government, no private sector, and no contract whose supplier is a reseller rather than VMware itself. Published value is contracted value, not expenditure. An agency may hold entitlement through arrangements that produce no contract notice at all.
| Year of expiry | Contracts | Published value |
|---|---|---|
| 2027 | 6 | A$106.0m |
| 2028 | 13 | A$379.3m |
| Total | 19 | A$485.3m |
Largest single notice: CN4211096, Department of Defence, A$178.1 million, 12 December 2025 to
11 December 2028.
Platform comparison. Read from each vendor’s own published documentation. Nothing here has been trialled, benchmarked or reference-checked.
| Platform | What ends the VMware licence | First-party tools to move systems across |
|---|---|---|
| Nutanix AHV | Bundled with a paid Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure licence | Nutanix Move, included |
| Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization | Under an OpenShift subscription | Migration Toolkit for Virtualization, included |
| Proxmox VE | Free to run; a subscription buys the enterprise repository and support | Built-in ESXi importer |
| Microsoft Hyper-V | Included in Windows Server licensing | System Center VMM conversion (requires System Center licensing), and the free Windows Admin Center VM Conversion extension, in public preview and limited to ten machines per batch |
All four ship first-party conversion tooling. They differ in maturity, in batch size, and in whether the tool itself carries a licence cost. Capability is read from each vendor's published documentation; nothing here has been trialled or benchmarked. The Microsoft standalone converter (MVMC) reached end of support in 2017 and is not a current option.
Job counts. Exact-phrase searches on Seek, Australia-wide. Measured 2 November 2026: VMware 239, Hyper-V 102, Nutanix 14, Proxmox 9. The same four searches on 14 October 2026 returned 239, 117, 14 and 12. Seek normalises the query, so “Hyper-V” is searched as hyper v; both readings use the same form. These are measurements on single days rather than standing facts. Recruitment is also an indirect signal: a migration delivered by an integrator, an offshore team or redeployed internal staff produces no advertisement, and vacancies are often written as “infrastructure modernisation” without naming a destination.
Defence’s direction. Reported by iTnews on 30 October 2026, by Ry Crozier. The report states the “mandate” was issued around September 2025, months before the A$178.1 million renewal was revealed; that its formality is unclear and Defence declined to comment on its scope; that it applies to all parts of Defence with VMware exposure; and that cost is not the only driver, with sovereignty also a concern. It rests on unnamed sources. Nothing in it is independently verified here, and the reading of the renewal as runway for a transition is my inference, not the report’s.