VMware Alternatives – How to Navigate the VMware Landscape After Broadcom’s Acquisition

If you are a VMware customer, you will have heard all about the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom. This takeover has created a lot of confusion and concern among VMware users with drastic changes to the VMware portfolio. In this blog, we look at what this acquisition means for your current workloads and explore the VMware alternatives available to you.

What Has Changed with VMware?

Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware has led to some major changes in its products and services that affect millions of customers worldwide. These changes are aimed at simplifying VMware’s portfolio, aligning with the industry trends, and proposedly offering more value and flexibility to customers.

However, they also pose some challenges and uncertainties for existing and potential VMware users, who need to understand how these changes will impact their IT environment and operations. Let’s take a look at the core changes.

Subscription licensing

One of the main changes that affect VMware customers is the transition from perpetual to subscription licensing, which means that you will have to pay a recurring fee to use VMware products and services. This can have a significant impact on your budget and IT strategy, especially if you are used to paying upfront for your licenses.

This shift to perpetual licensing also impacts support and subscription (SnS) renewals, Hybrid purchasing program (HPP) and Subscription purchasing program (SPP) credits.

It’s worth noting that customers can continue to use perpetual licenses that they’ve already purchased but after a customer’s effective end date, new subscription licences cannot be purchased.

Reduction of SKU Options

Another change is the reduction of SKU options to the two new subscription-based SKUs: VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF). VCF is an enterprise-grade private cloud platform that includes vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and Aria suite of tools, while VVF is a basic on-premises offering that includes Aria Operations and Aria Operations for logs. These SKUs are now based on per-core licensing, which requires a minimum of 16 cores per socket and 2 sockets per host, affecting smaller organisations with increased costs that don’t need that quantity of resources.

Additionally, VMware has discontinued some products and features, such as ESXi Hypervisor Free Edition which was previously commonly used for training, testing, or POC purposes. For a full breakdown of the changes, see the table provided here.

End-User Computing (EUC) Division Sold

VMware has also sold off its EUC division to private equity firm KKR, which includes the VDI solution Horizon, and Workspace One an Endpoint management platform. Although KKR promises to provide further innovation and investment to the product, Horizon will likely struggle to maintain market share as flexible working requirements increase the demand for cloud-based VDI solutions such as Azure Virtual Desktop.

Invitation Only Partner Programme

VMware has become an invitation-only partner program, meaning that not all partners will be able to sell and support VMware products and services. This can create uncertainty and disruption for customers who rely on their existing partner relationships and want to continue working with them. Moreover, VMware support has migrated to Broadcom support portals, which may affect the quality and availability of technical assistance, we will have to wait and see on this one.

VMware Alternatives for Customers

As a customer who is affected by the recent changes, you may be wondering what the VMware alternatives are. Depending on your IT strategy, migration timeline, budget, and cloud skills, you have different routes to consider. Here are your possible options and their pros and cons.

• Continue with VMware: You can choose to stay with VMware and adapt to the new subscription model, SKU options, partner program, and support portals.
  -This option may suit you if your pricing has not increased drastically, you’re satisfied with the VMware products and services, have no plans to migrate to the cloud, or require a hybrid setup.
  – However, this option will likely entail higher costs, licensing complexity, partner uncertainty, and IT strategy disruption.

• Migrate Hypervisor: You can choose to migrate your workloads to a different hypervisor solution, such as Hyper-V, Nutanix, or Oracle VirtualBox.
  – This option may suit you if you want to reduce your dependency on VMware, lower your licensing costs, or leverage existing skills and tools.
  – However, this option may also involve significant migration efforts, compatibility issues, performance impacts, and operational changes. Therefore likely only a useful option if you have a relatively small digital estate.

• Migrate to the cloud: You can choose to migrate your workloads to the cloud, either as native services or as VMware-based services.
  – This option may suit you if you want to take advantage of the cloud benefits, such as scalability, flexibility, security, innovation, and integration.
  – However, this option may also require some refactoring, rearchitecting, reskilling, and governance changes.

In the next section, we focus on the third VMware alternative, migrate to the cloud, and show you how you can use Azure as your destination platform.

Migrating your Workloads to Azure

Azure VMware Solution

One option for migrating your VMware workloads to Azure is Azure VMware Solution (AVS), a service that allows you to run VMware on dedicated Azure infrastructure managed by Microsoft. With AVS, you can leverage your existing VMware skills, processes and tools to manage and operate your VMware environment in Azure. You can also benefit from the scalability, security, and integration of Azure services, such as backup, monitoring, identity, and networking.

We will explore the full benefits and challenges of choosing AVS in our next blog.

Azure Native Services

The other possible route away from VMware is to migrate your workloads to Azure native services, such as IaaS Azure VMs or PaaS services such as Azure App Service, Azure SQL, Azure Files, and Azure Virtual Desktop. These services offer more scalability, flexibility, security, and integration with the Azure cloud platform, and can help you reduce costs, improve performance, remove management overhead and modernise your applications.

While AVS can offer a quick and easy way to migrate your VMware workloads to Azure, it isn’t the best long-term solution for your organisation. AVS still relies on the same VMware stack that runs on-premises, which means you will miss out on some of the advanced features and capabilities that Azure native services provide, such as autoscaling, serverless computing, AI and analytics, DevOps integration, and more. By migrating to Azure native services you can move along your migration journey and modernise your applications and data, making them more secure, resilient, and agile.

Transparity as your Migration Partner

If you’ve looked at the VMware alternatives and decided the cloud is right for you, we can help. Whether you want to migrate to AVS, jump straight to Azure native or just aren’t sure yet, we can help you with your migration journey. Transparity offers a range of services and solutions, including:

• VMware Migration Assessment: We can help you assess your current VMware environment and identify the best destination for your workloads. We can also provide you with a detailed business case and cost analysis, showing you the potential savings and benefits of moving to Azure.
• Azure Migration Service: We can help you plan, execute, and validate your migration to Azure, using proven methodologies and best practices based on the Cloud Adoption Framework. We can also help you optimise your Azure environment and leverage the full potential of the cloud platform.
• Azure Managed Service: We can help you manage and monitor your Azure native services, ensuring their availability, reliability, and performance. We can also help you implement backup, disaster recovery, and security solutions, as well as provide you with ongoing support and guidance.
• Azure Skilling Service: We can help you upskill your team and equip them with the knowledge and competencies to use Azure native services. We can also help you adopt a cloud-first mindset and culture, and align your IT strategy with your business goals.
• Access to Microsoft Funding: As an Azure Expert MSP, we can also help you access the Azure Migrate and Modernise program, which provides funding and upskilling for eligible customers making the move to Azure.