Given the proposed increases in costs around VMWare since the Broadcom acquisition, what are the realistic alternatives in the virtualisation category?
Sort by:
The cost increase will push organizations to look for open source alternatives like Proxmox.
Azure VMware Solution is a potential alternative. The VMware licensing is included in the service cost and it's fully compatible with ESX hosted workloads. HCX provides a straightforward migration path.
We are looking at alternatives. Openstack is a potential alternative for us.
https://www.openstack.org/vmware-migration-to-openstack/
Since we already had a large contract in place with Microsoft we are shifting over to Azure Stack HCI. The hypervisor cost is included as part of our ELA as we have Software Insurance in place. Our plan is transition off VMWare over the course of the next 12-18 months to a hybrid cloud model leveraging Azure Stack for the VM's that make sense to keep on premise.
It strongly depends on how hard the VMware-specific functionality is used and integrated in the organization. If there is a loose coupling (only hypervisor functionality) switching over to other hypervisors shouldn't be all that difficult. A lot of work, yes, but not difficult. For instance, a shop that has a strong Linux and Windows based environment might consider switching to hypervisors that are specific to those environments (e.g. KVM-based, such as Red Hat Virtualization, for Linux, and hyper-V for Windows) or just switch to one of these.
However, the larger your environment and the more you consume the VMware-specific features and functionalities (like SRM, like vVols, etc.) the more complex such an endeavor becomes. At a certain point, you'll need to make the tough decision on either just swallowing the higher cost, versus taking a high cost just in the migration (which might not result in any functional benefits).