Life beyond VMware: What are the options?

There is no single replacement for VMware, and that may be a good thing

It’s no secret that a lot of organisations are moving away from VMware. It’s also widely accepted that there is no drop-in alternative to the virtualisation platform that has underpinned many companies’ IT estates for decades.

So, what calculations do IT leaders need to make as they ponder the future of their infrastructure? How might these plans affect other areas of the business, and what does the destination look like?

We asked three companies operating in this space how they see the options taking shape.

Why leave VMware?

When Broadcom acquired VMware, it replaced perpetual licensing with subscriptions, consolidated individual products into bundles, moved from per-socket to per-core licensing, and raised prices for many customers. It also whittled down the number of accredited resellers and service providers.

A recent survey commissioned by Rimini Street found 90% considering alternatives, with 73% identifying cost savings as an important consideration.

This was certainly the case at Virgin Media O2 (VMO2), a story we covered recently, where the renewal bill came in almost four times higher than the previous invoice. But that wasn’t the real reason for the telco’s shift. Broadcom’s price hike simply accelerated modernisation plans that were already on the cards.

See also: Why Virgin Media O2 is replacing VMware with Kubernetes

Indeed, the bigger story is not one of migration. It’s about choosing the right options on the road ahead, in the face of changing demands and new technologies.

How do you solve a problem like VMware?

Andrew Brinded, CRO at infrastructure virtualisation company Nutanix, summed up the choices available to VMware customers. “You can go all in into the public cloud, and you can do that by refactoring your applications; you can try and lift-and-shift onto another hypervisor; you could move to containers; or you could go to a service provider.”

There’s another option too, of course: “You can stay on Broadcom and pay the bill.”

Decisions will be heavily influenced by the end goal, pointed out Andrew Slater, cloud portfolio director at MSP Node4: “Changing hypervisor can be an infrastructure migration; moving to containers is normally an application modernisation decision.”

From one to many

The main choices are summarised in the table below. They include standalone hypervisors, both open source and proprietary, and those that are part of larger platforms. There’s also the cloud-native ecosystem, SaaS, public cloud, and hosted or managed-service options.

So plenty of options exist, but it may not be as simple as a like-for-like swap. The question is not what replaces VMware, but which platforms should replace which parts of the VMware estate.

Indeed, for most companies of any size, a move away from VMware is unlikely to be a clean break. Many workloads are simply unsuitable candidates for containers or public cloud, while alternative hypervisors may bring additional costs and risks that could dent the case for migration.

Depending on the existing stack, savings on VMware licenses may not mean reduced TCO. In particular, those with dependencies on VMware features such as storage and network layers will need to replicate them on the new platform. Plus, staff will require retraining and third-party support may eat into any savings. The best option could be to leave at least some workloads where they are.

“Our view, from many years in virtualisation, is that the workloads still running on VMware are there for a reason,” said Sirish Raghuram, co-founder and chief growth officer at private cloud and virtualisation company Platform9, and a former VMware engineer.

Installations may be on-premises only for regulatory compliance, or they could host “third-party applications that are well configured and stable on the infrastructure they run on today,” Raghuram went on.

With VMware migration, timing is everything

A large-scale migration is certainly not something teams do for kicks. It implies expense, risk, stress and possibly downtime. Generally, therefore, VMware migrations are timed to coincide with other scheduled activity, as Slater explained.

“The strongest migration cases tend to occur where organisations face a combination of significant VMware cost increases, an upcoming hardware refresh, a contractual renewal, and workloads that do not rely heavily on VMware-specific capabilities.”

In addition to getting the timing right, teams will want to be sure the economic case is solid. That means comparing VMware costs over the next few years with the cost of licensing alternatives and undertaking the migration, including replicating dependencies, retraining staff and filling skills gaps.

Account should also be taken of the additional complexity that might arise, particularly if multiple vendors and/or partners are involved.

New hypervisor on-premises

In the absence of modernisation plans, moving to an alternative hypervisor while retaining the servers, storage and networking the organisation already owns is the “lowest-cost, lowest-risk and least disruptive option,” said Raghuram.

But, he warned, not all hypervisors are the same. “Some alternatives require new infrastructure and storage, which can be very expensive with today's memory and storage prices.”

VMs to containers

Moving from virtual machines (VMs) to containers is a multi-step process rather than a lift-and-shift. Thus, this option is best considered part of a wider application modernisation programme.

“Kubernetes is an excellent technology for microservices and cloud-native applications, and the AI ecosystem is being built on it. But using Kubernetes to run traditional virtual machines is a bad idea,” said Raghuram, pointing out that VMs and containers use the underlying infrastructure in completely different ways.

Slater concurred. “We are not seeing organisations simply moving entire VMware estates into containers. That is largely because many VMware VMs support traditional applications that cannot practically be containerised without application changes.”

Public cloud and MSP options

Moving VMware workloads to a public cloud could be feasible depending on the workload, particularly for smaller deployments. However, warned Raghuram, “Public cloud isn't a panacea; it trades one set of problems for another.”

He added: “The larger the organisation, the stronger the case for staying on-premises.”

In particular, cloud costs can rise quickly, while the ease with which resources can be consumed can make spending harder to control.

MSPs can help control these costs, whether running VMware or an alternative, via predictable, consumption-based billing.

After acquiring VMware, Broadcom restructured its MSP and cloud service provider ecosystem, reducing their number and narrowing the options available to VMware customers. However, many MSPs offer services specifically tailored to the needs of Broadcom refugees.

According to Slater, some organisations are using MSPs as a stepping stone to application modernisation, hosting VMware there with the expectation that their VM usage will wind down over coming years. “They therefore need an infrastructure model that can commercially contract as well as expand, without making another long-term infrastructure commitment.”

This is complicated. Why not just stay on VMware?

Despite all the talk of an exodus, a significant number of organisations will stay with Broadcom, as Slater explained. “VMware remains one of the strongest and most mature private cloud technology stacks in the market and has a long track record of enterprise reliability.”

In his view, the 'remainers’ category includes organisations that operate at significant scale, making enough use of the platform’s many features to rule out a change despite the rising bill. Others consume VMware through an MSP or other third party, where “the economics are different because the technology is operated collectively as a service provider platform.”

The broader point, though, is that many organisations have accepted that VMware is no longer the default option - and not just because of pricing. Cloud-native technologies have changed the game, while newer AI workloads are more likely to align with that world. At the same time, an increasingly mature ecosystem of VMware alternatives has emerged.

Companies “increasingly want to place the right workload on the right platform, balancing cost, resilience, performance and operational requirements,” Slater summed up.

It’s a journey where the destination is not necessarily Nutanix, KVM, Kubernetes or the public cloud. It is an enterprise architecture in which there is no default option.

“I don't believe that migrating away from Broadcom was a one-year event or a two-year event. This is a multi-year event,” said Brinded.