Proxmox appears to have won the race to woo British supermarket giant and vocal VMware detractor Tesco.

A job listing for a head of software development role at the want-away firm reveals its apparent choice, with stated role responsibilities including “modernising Tesco’s edge virtualisation estate through the migration from VMware to Proxmox.”

An India-based development lead is wanted by Tesco, with the successful candidate tasked with defining architecture, migration patterns, and repeatable build configurations across networking and storage and wider workloads.

What looks to be an initial dip into the open-source alternative to VMware, Tesco wants someone to lead design, engineering, and production validation “before progressive rollout across the retail estate.”

Tesco’s desire for a “safe and predictable migration from VMware to Proxmox” comes as the retailer has been among the most vocal detractors of VMware’s post-acquisition shake-up. It filed a breach of contract lawsuit in late 2025, contending Broadcom failed to honour perpetual licenses it bought in 2021 for vSphere Foundation, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), and Tanzu. The jump to Proxmox comes amid previous reports suggesting Tesco was racing to get some 40,000 servers off VMware.

Neither Tesco nor Proxmox has officially commented on the move across, but should the potential migration come to fruition, the retailer would find itself working with a VMware alternative priding itself on open source.

Its virtualisation offerings, like its Datacenter Manager, provide relatively basic management for virtual machines (VMs) and containers, but crucially it doesn’t force users to pay for unwanted or unused software features.

A RunZero report dated last November suggested that want-away VMware users were jumping to Proxmox in droves, with Version 1.0 of its flagship Datacenter Manager offering featuring the ability for live migration of VMs between different clusters, similar to VMware’s vMotion but without the need for a wider Broadcom-esque license.

Tesco’s move to Proxmox would be a blow to Nutanix, which has quickly and repeatedly emerged as the go-to for want-away VMware users. Perpetual license changes and subscription shifts have caused as many as 90% of some 270 surveyed IT leaders to admit they’re considering unsticking from VMware.

Of course, VMware remains unfazed, with CEO Hock Tan previously touting that more than 90% of its 10,000 largest customers signed up to VCF in its first year alone. But that hasn’t stopped it from making it slightly harder for folks to jump ship, having recently culled a software kit used by many of its rivals to migrate VMs to a different virtualisation platform.