What VMease is, and who it is for

In one paragraph

VMease is a private cloud operating model built on open virtualisation. It sits above Proxmox VE and turns a cluster into a multi-tenant platform an operator can run commercially — provisioning, networking, firewalls, backup, disaster recovery, quotas, chargeback and observability under one control plane, with delegated administration so tenants can serve themselves.

It exists because the economics of enterprise virtualisation changed and the tooling did not. Operators leaving VMware generally find the hypervisor is the easy part to replace; what is missing is everything around it — the tenancy model, the policy engine, the billing data, the day-2 workflows. That gap is the product.

What it covers

Each of these is a working area of the platform with its own documentation, not a roadmap item.

• Multi-tenant cloud management with account hierarchy and delegated administration
• Policy-based automation driven by metadata, tags and resource groups
• VM lifecycle and policy-aware placement across pools, storage and capacity
• Workflow automation for day-2 operations, eg: automated backup restore tests
• Deep health status Proxmox monitoring & automated patching
• Out of the box CMDB combined with pervasive monitoring, giving rapid AI incident triage and remediation
• Software-defined networking with VLAN and VXLAN-backed tenant networks
• Virtual firewalls and edge services, scoped per tenant
• Storage, backup and recovery
• Disaster recovery and replication across sites
• Identity, RBAC and delegated administration including single sign-on
• Billing, metering and chargeback
• Resource pools, quotas and fair usage
• Observability and an operations centre
• Browser console and self-service tenant access
• Platform onboarding and Proxmox VE cluster management

What it is not

Scope boundaries are the fastest way to tell whether a tool is the right shape for a problem.

• Not just a self-service IaaS portal or a new GUI skin for Proxmox — VMease adds functionality of its own, including AI operations, out-of-the-box automation, and VyOS-based carrier-grade networking
• Not a public cloud — it runs on infrastructure the operator owns or leases
• Not a hosted or managed service — customers install and operate VMease themselves; VMease does not run the platform for them and holds none of their workloads or data
• Not a US company — adopting VMease does not place infrastructure or data inside US hyperscale providers

Who it is built for

• VMware enterprises with VM-centric usage patterns looking for alternatives to VMware VCF and VVF bundles
• VMware vSphere 8 customers heading towards vSphere 8 end of life in October 2027
• Cloud service providers running or replacing a VMware-based platform
• Managed service providers commercialising Proxmox VE
• Enterprises reducing virtualisation licensing cost without losing capability
• Organisations concerned about data and system sovereignty
• Government and public sector with data residency and sovereignty requirements
• Time-poor IT generalist teams who need a low-touch VM platform that works securely without specialist skills, time, effort or money to operate

Questions we get before a demo

What is VMease?

VMease is a private cloud management platform — a control plane that turns Proxmox VE clusters into a multi-tenant cloud an operator can run commercially. It covers tenancy, policy-driven automation, software-defined networking, virtual firewalls, backup and disaster recovery, quotas, metering and chargeback, and operational monitoring.

Is VMease a hypervisor?

No. VMease manages Proxmox VE rather than replacing it. The hypervisor stays open-source and unmodified; VMease supplies the multi-tenancy, automation and commercial model around it.

How is VMease different from a Proxmox management panel?

Scope. A panel typically gives customers a view of their own virtual machines. VMease is the operating model for the whole platform: account hierarchy and delegated administration, policy-based automation driven by tags and resource groups, tenant networking and firewalls, backup and replication policy, quota and fair-usage enforcement, metering that produces billing data from platform state, and an operations centre across every tenant.

Does VMease replace VMware?

It replaces the management and commercial layer that VMware products provide, running on open virtualisation instead. Operators moving off vSphere, VCF or VVF typically use VMease to recover the capabilities they would otherwise lose in the move — tenancy, self-service, chargeback and day-2 automation — rather than accepting a less capable platform in exchange for lower licensing cost.

Can service providers bill their customers through VMease?

Yes. Metering derives from platform state — running-state transitions and resource consumption generate billing events — so chargeback data comes from what actually ran rather than from a separate ledger kept in step by hand. Quotas and fair-usage policy are enforced in the same system.

Where is VMease run, and is it sovereign?

You run it. VMease installs on infrastructure you own or lease, in your own jurisdiction, and it is not a public cloud — no workload has to leave your estate. VMease does not host the platform, does not operate it on your behalf, and holds none of your workloads or data. Sovereignty here is a property of that model rather than of our address.

Does using VMease put our data under US jurisdiction?

No. VMease is not a US company — VMease Limited is registered in Jersey, Channel Islands (JFSC company number 161188) and operates from Dublin, Ireland. More importantly, we do not hold your data at all: the platform runs on your infrastructure under your control. Adopting VMease is the alternative to placing infrastructure and data inside US hyperscale providers, not another route into them.

How much does VMease cost?

There is no public price list. Commercial terms depend on platform size and operating model, so pricing is quoted per deployment. A total cost of ownership comparison against current virtualisation spend is usually the fastest way to get a meaningful number, and the TCO calculator on this site is the starting point.

Is anyone running VMease in production?

Yes. Digital Craftsmen operates a regional cloud platform from two data centres outside London and migrated its VMware-based stacks to VMease. Their customer story on this site covers the commercial reasoning and the migration.

Can we evaluate it without building a lab?

Yes — the test drive is a guided browser-based evaluation that needs no hardware and no installation. For a deeper evaluation, a demo against a running platform is the usual next step.

Operational questions about using the product are answered in the documentation FAQ.