Navigating the Broadcom Storm: VMware Acquisition & Alternatives
Written by Jonathan Gazeley, Container Platform Consultant, Tier 2 Consulting.
Been hit by VMware’s recent changes? Tier 2 Consulting offers assistance in navigating the complexities of virtualisation.
In this article, we cover ESXi discontinuation, vSphere Hypervisor changes and VMware alternatives. Tier 2’s infrastructure consultants can design and implement your VM migration and offer advice. To explore your options in light of the Broadcom acquisition, click below to sign up for a free, no obligation consultation call.
Broadcom Acquisition of VMware
It’s been talked about a lot in the tech headlines – Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware in November 2023. Broadcom has been pressing ahead with drastic changes to its products and pricing, which have had a significant effect on customers.
In December, they stopped selling perpetually licensed versions of VMware products, including the well-known vSphere hypervisor. Existing perpetual licences will eventually expire, and all new sales will be subscription-based. And of course, we anticipate prices will be going up.
In January, they axed their partner program, potentially excluding about 28,000 existing partners from participating in VMware sales and services. Broadcom will be transitioning to an invitation-only partner program, but few details have yet been released. And in February, they discontinued their ESXi product – the free version of the vSphere Hypervisor.
All of these changes have created a lot of uncertainty for end customers and partners in a short period of time, and some of our customers are looking for ways to reduce or remove their dependency on VMware, and are coming to us asking about alternatives and migration routes to other platforms. So we’ve put this article together to share some key bits of advice.
Alternatives to ESXi
As mentioned above, ESXi is the free version of vSphere Hypervisor and has limited functionality (such as nodes being limited to 2 CPU sockets, and having the ability to load-balance multiple nodes). We typically wouldn’t recommend that it is used in a production environment – however some customers have valid reasons for wanting to run a zero-cost hypervisor and are happy to forgo the paid features.
For these customers, we would typically recommend using an open-source hypervisor such as Proxmox VE or XCP-ng. Both of these products are free to use and provide more features than the restricted ESXi version (such as multi-node clusters). There is also the option of commercial support from the vendor.
Alternatives to vSphere
vSphere Hypervisor isn’t going anywhere – it’s just that the price has gone up and the means of accessing it has changed. For some people, this is enough to put them off using it and to damage their confidence in Broadcom/VMware. Indeed, Forrester has already predicted that 20% of existing VMware Enterprise customers will begin their escape in 2024.
For those who want to migrate away from VMware products, or use something else for their next iteration, there are options – the simplest like-for-like being commercial versions of the open source products Proxmox and XCP-ng, Nutanix, and even Hyper-V. It just depends on your scale and requirements.
Next Generation Virtualisation: An alternative approach
As Tier 2 Consulting is a Red Hat Premier Partner, it would be rude not to mention Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, which is Red Hat’s offering in the virtualisation space.
OpenShift Virtualization is a hybrid between virtualisation and containerisation – it allows you to run VMs in your OpenShift cluster, as if they were containers, using a single platform and a consistent set of tools. You can then choose to modernise your legacy VM-based applications over time, or leave them as VMs.
The advantages of this approach are:
1. Lower TCO: You have a cloud-native approach to VM management without the cost of proprietary software.
2. Flexibility: You get traditional VM behaviour while your VMs participate in modern DevSecOps and GitOps pipelines via Infrastructure as Code.
3. Resilience and Scalability: You can manage your VM fleet with a single pane of glass and modern dashboard technology.
This could be a great fit if you already have an OpenShift cluster on bare metal, as OpenShift Virtualization is included as part of the OpenShift Container Platform (OCP), OpenShift Platform Plus (OPP) and OpenShift Kubernetes Engine (OKE) products.
How can Tier 2 help?
Virtualisation is a large and complex field, and changes to your critical infrastructure shouldn’t be undertaken lightly! At Tier 2, our infrastructure consultants will be happy to discuss your requirements, design your next-generation virtualisation platform, implement it, and help you migrate to it.
Working with you, we follow a risk-focused approach for solving the logistical challenge of large scale VM migration, using the following steps:
1. Application Portfolio Assessment – We assess your application portfolio to determine priorities and set the agenda for modernisation.
2. Candidate Applications – We prove and pilot the migration approach with one or two workloads, building reference implementations from real-world applications.
3. Migration Factory – We adapt the results of a pilot into a repeatable delivery pattern allowing the approach to scale, applying lessons learnt and enabling repeatability.
