Are there realistic alternatives to VMware?
If you are a VMware shop, and you’re concerned about how Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware has been affecting your business, you may be wondering whether any realistic alternatives to VMware exist in the market.
Since acquiring VMware, Broadcom has significantly raised prices, canceled reseller programs, and laid off 2,000+ VMware employees. With such disruptive changes affecting thousands of VMware customers, here are five fundamental questions that VMware shops need to ask right now.
See how much your Org can benefit from migrating away from VMware vSphere with this webinar, presented by Principal Solution Architect Daniel Virassamy, highlighting the best path to a place beyond VMware.
What are your criteria for virtualization solutions?
You’ve invested a big chunk of your IT budget in VMware products and services for years. Is your organization willing to stay with VMware despite negative changes in pricing and licensing? After some of Broadcom’s acquisitions, customers also experienced negative changes in support quality and product innovation. Think about your core business objectives and the benefits you, your tenants and end customers get from VMware. What are your critical success factors and KPIs? Also look at your company roadmap. What benefits will you need in the future as you scale your infrastructure, and tenants and use cases evolve?
What are your minimum criteria for retaining VMware as a vendor? Quantitative criteria might include availability rates, delivery lead time, mean time to recovery, deployment frequency, change failure rate, or maximum price per node. You might also have qualitative criteria such as fair sales tactics, hardware/ software compatibility, or specific types of contracts. Similarly, what are deal breakers that would compel you to move to another vendor? What are your current pain points and operational issues?
How locked in are you?
The real question here is: If VMware makes changes to their offerings, and you decide it’s better to migrate some or all of your workloads to another infrastructure vendor, would you be able to? What is your level of exposure to VMware? How many workloads do you have in production on VMware infrastructure? And it’s not just the software stack — how deeply in bed are you with VMware methodologies? Do you have any dependencies or contractual obligations that prevent you from migrating?
Keep in mind that VMware customers have been migrating to other infrastructure solutions for a decade. If you decide you want to migrate, there are many services and tools available to assist, and an expert can help assess your IT infrastructure, processes, and level of workload mobility.
What alternatives are available?
There are two primary alternatives for virtualization: proprietary and open source. Proprietary virtualization vendors have similar high licensing fees and vendor lock-in as VMware. Open source alternatives offer flexibility and a wide range of support options that enable you to move fast and cater to your unique needs.
For an enterprise-grade solution to virtualized workloads, the chief alternative to VMware is OpenStack, the most widely deployed open source cloud software in the world. Adopted by industry leaders like Adobe, Booking.com, Inmarsat, NVIDIA, and Walmart Labs, OpenStack has evolved over the past 12 years to become a mature technology that offers close to feature parity with VMware. It also dramatically reduces the total cost per CPU and eliminates vendor lock-in. Thanks to recent innovations in containerizing OpenStack, the infrastructure-as-a-service platform is now easy to configure, scale, and upgrade.
Economic and societal challenges are also pushing organizations everywhere to modernize their applications and start adopting containers and microservices. Container adoption and Kubernetes have officially gone mainstream, and many VMware shops are going cloud native to benefit from greater efficiency, scalability, and resiliency. Containers are also greatly advantageous for supporting new use cases like edge computing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.
In terms of delivery of OpenStack and Kubernetes, there are also different options to choose from — ranging from DIY, to enterprise support to fully-managed remote operations — depending on how much you want to keep operations in-house vs. outsourced.
When considering your choices, you want to look at a vendor that can support you through the transition and help you to operate the new environment, freeing up valuable time for your team to focus on what drives value for your business rather than looking after infrastructure.
What steps are needed to migrate from VMware to other providers?
The typical process of migrating from VMware to OpenStack or other infrastructure solutions involves the following steps:
Assess your workloads
Migrate images
Create or migrate tenants, users, security groups, and networks
Migrate VMs and volumes
Test that everything is working correctly
Flip the switch to production
Looking at options other than VMware? Check out this presentation outlining the best path forward for life without VMware.
Virtualized workload migration is no longer as difficult as it was in the past, and most major infrastructure vendors offer migration services. Mirantis can work closely with your organization’s key stakeholders to design and build an OpenStack cloud optimized for your use case, then help migrate VMware workloads to the new environment. Often it’s possible to migrate using your existing hardware. For a deeper dive into our automated migration tooling and methodology, see our VMware Migration Playbook.
Of course you’ll also need to transition people, workflows, and processes. If you want to keep operations in house, you’ll need to provide technical training for your team and safeguard your deployment with enterprise support. Otherwise you can partner with a vendor that offers fully-managed remote operations.
Something to consider when looking at a migration is whether you want to move some of your applications from monolithic to microservices to gain the advantages of reduced infrastructure resources and increased modernization through containerized solutions like Kubernetes. The typical steps for the application layer include the following:
Define boundaries
Identify coupling
Move to Remote Procedure Call (RPC)
Define data ownership
Implement asynchronous messaging
Learn more in our blog, Moving to Cloud Native.
If you expect to have mixed workloads of virtualized and containerized applications, you may want to consider a platform that can support infrastructure for both as you gradually migrate different types of workloads. For example, Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes (MOSK) features a Kubernetes underlay, which enables fully-automated Day 2 operations. With a unified platform that can manage infrastructure for both virtualized and containerized workloads, MOSK can distribute workloads between multiple infrastructure providers, providing a consistent self-service experience wherever you deploy.
Is it time to future proof your infrastructure?
Software innovation is core to your company’s success, and it depends on efficient management of IT infrastructure. Traditional virtualization has worked well for decades, but software has evolved, and so has infrastructure. To stay competitive now and in the future, many companies are strategically adopting open source cloud innovation, which they view as necessary to not only accelerate their pace of software delivery, but also to retain the most talented engineers, who want to work with the most innovative tools and technologies.
Migration is never easy, and you’ll need to address changes in people, processes, and technology. To minimize the risk, cost, and time involved, it is essential to choose the right partner and tooling that can efficiently migrate your types of workloads to cloud infrastructure optimized for your needs. For example, Mirantis offers Workload Migration and Application Migration and Modernization services, which leverage automated platforms, well-defined processes, and specialized expertise to rapidly inventory, assess, refactor, and migrate your workloads.
A critical juncture for VMware customers
Ultimately, what’s most important right now after Broadcom’s takeover are risk mitigation and business continuity for your organization. As you weigh your options, now is the time to rethink your enterprise IT strategy and assess what you, your tenants, and end customers truly need. Just as the COVID-19 pandemic was a crucial juncture for many businesses to start their digital transformation, the VMware acquisition may also be your opportunity to make vital changes your organization needs for long-term success.
Want to learn more? Find out about VMware migration bundles from Mirantis.
