By Fred Lherault, Field CTO EMEA/Emerging at Pure Storage
The recent changes to VMware licensing that followed Broadcom’s acquisition have kickstarted a conversation around alternative approaches to virtualization. A 2024 survey carried out among 110 VMware customers by US-based support provider Rimini Street found nearly all respondents (98%) were already using, considering, or planning for alternatives for at least part of their VMware estate. Although, 79% stated their current licensed VMware software meets their business needs.
Broadcom’s replacement of VMware perpetual licensing with a subscription model and bundling of VMware products into a portfolio might not be the best approach for everyone. It’s therefore unsurprising that some businesses are assessing alternatives. However it’s not a trivial switch, especially when it comes to management, storage, and data protection for those VMs.
What are the alternatives?
Overall, options boil down to staying with VMware while mitigating cost increases by seeking efficiencies elsewhere, or migrating some, or all, VM workloads off VMware. Alternatives to VMware include moving to a different hypervisor, running VM workloads in Kubernetes (containerized or not), or migrating VMware workloads to the cloud.
Containerization is a strong alternative to server virtualization. Here, KubeVirt provides an environment where developers can build apps in containers and virtual machines in parallel. KubeVirt is an open-source tool that lets you orchestrate VMs with Kubernetes. Normally, Kubernetes is designed for containers, which are lightweight and portable, but KubeVirt extends Kubernetes so it can also manage traditional VMs in the same environment using the same tools and workflows.
Advantages include lower licensing costs and that containerization is ready-made for cloud-native applications that can straddle on-prem and cloud environments. That’s in addition to the advantages of rapidity of deployment and scaling, that containers offer.
Storage has been a challenge with containers historically, as they were originally conceived as stateless. However today there are some very mature storage and data protection solutions for Kubernetes workloads, both for containers and VMs. The key is to look for a vendor that offers a data management platform designed for Kubernetes, while providing storage, data protection and orchestration natively to that environment. The ability to support KubeVirt at scale is important for the scenarios discussed here.
The pros and cons of migrating
Switching to alternative platforms can bring benefits like lower licensing costs, but organizations must also consider key factors. These include staff skills for the new environment, integration with existing systems (backup, storage, networking), hardware compatibility, and the overall cost of migration.
Regardless of the route decided upon, organizations will need to consider the management overhead, storage, data protection, and cost of any alternatives to VMware before making a decision.
Whatever the plan, get storage right
Whether you stay with VMware or switch to another platform, your storage must match up to avoid performance issues. Virtual machine workload performance needs can vary, from intensive and highly-random AI and transactional workloads with lots of reads and writes, to those that are more read-heavy and sequential. As such, virtualized environments demand storage that can handle high volumes of random I/O, with many virtual machines running on each compute node.
Flash storage is essential for virtualization, because it’s well-suited to these I/O demands, but it also needs to be disaggregated from the compute layer. The ability to scale compute and storage capacity independently as data volumes grow, is not only extremely useful and cost effective, it also enables the use of the same storage systems with multiple virtualization or containerization solutions at the same time.
Since VM workloads range from heavy, random I/O (like AI and transactions) to more read-heavy, sequential tasks, all-flash storage is the best fit due to its increased performance, density, and reliability compared to other options. Ideally, choose a vendor offering options from ultra-high performance to cost-effective, high-density solutions like QLC flash.
The bottom line in the virtualization market
Businesses that want an alternative to VMware can migrate to a different hypervisor or embrace containerization. Whichever path they choose, there are serious benefits, but it’s not a move to be taken lightly because the new environment must fit with existing dependencies in backup, storage, and other key areas of infrastructure. As these organisations embrace newer solutions that may run in parallel of VMware, it’s important to prioritize flexibility and ease of use to reduce the administrative overheads of running multiple platforms simultaneously.
