This news underscores the growing dissatisfaction with Broadcom's hefty price tags and declining service quality.

Beeks Group, which provides virtual private servers and bare metal boxes for financial services, has a sprawling presence in over 20 data centres. Boasting a fleet of more than 20,000 virtual machines and 3,000 bare metal servers, Beeks has made the switch to OpenNebula, favouring its hybrid cloud capabilities and efficient use of KVM hypervisors.

Beeks head of production management Matthew Cretney said the move was sparked after the company got a hefty bill from Broadcom, charging ten times more for software licenses than before. Beeks's customers voiced concerns that VMware, once seen as essential infrastructure, no longer held that status.

Cretney noted that VMware's declining support services and innovation had not helped.

"We felt VMware's suite had too much management overhead, diverting too many resources from running VMs for clients," Cretney said.

The VMware stack’s nature as a virtual machine management platform didn't sit well with Beeks customers who prefer bare metal for its superior security and low latency. The need for a single tool to manage both VMs and bare metal servers was a key factor in the switch.

Beeks had to overhaul proprietary software tied to VMware APIs to interface with the new open-source stack. Additionally, OpenNebula's initial tools for collecting crucial metrics like CPU performance and resource use were lacking, forcing Beeks to develop its own solutions.

However, the move paid off. Shifting to OpenNebula resulted in a 200 per cent increase in virtual machine efficiency, allowing more VMs per server and reducing costs for both Beeks and its clients.