Key Takeaways
What you need to know
Legacy hypervisor licensing costs have become a board-level financial risk, with mid-market to enterprise SAP customers spending €500K to over €2.5M annually on ESX environments alone.
SUSE KVM is already bundled into SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP at no additional cost, meaning organizations can eliminate the hypervisor licensing line item entirely by switching to a solution they may already own.
The true cost of proprietary virtualization extends well beyond the base license — hidden "add-on taxes" for management consoles, proprietary storage drivers, and hardware lock-in make the total switching savings significantly larger than they first appear.
Why paying a “Hypervisor Tax” is draining your IT budget—and how to reclaim it.
The virtualization market has shifted. With rising licensing costs and enforced subscription models, the cost of “staying put” has skyrocketed. For SAP landscapes, where performance is non-negotiable, the financial inefficiency of legacy hypervisors is now a board-level risk. This guide provides a side-by-side financial analysis of uncoupling from proprietary hypervisors and
leveraging the open-source power already built into your SAP-certified operating system: SUSE KVM.