I'm involved with Red Hat's effort to shift customers off VMware (upstream project: https://github.com/libguestfs/virt-v2v https://github.com/libguestfs/virt-v2

I'm involved with Red Hat's effort to shift customers off VMware (upstream project: https://github.com/libguestfs/virt-v2v https://github.com/libguestfs/virt-v2v). Things have really blown up since the Broadcom acquisition at the end of 2023. For us 12K VMs is a medium to large customer, but definitely not unusual. Think someone like a regional bank. A full conversion of such a customer might involve one consultant on-site, a scoping exercise to classify the VMs into groups and assess which ones are going to be more or less difficult to convert, and perhaps 1-3 months of work to convert them all. Individual VMs would be down from anything between a simple reboot, up to 12 hours, depending on which strategy we used for conversion (there are complicated trade-offs related to storage and network bandwidth).